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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Narendra Modi's focus on patents at Indian Science Congress is not good advice -Vasudevan Mukunth

Narendra Modi's focus on patents at Indian Science Congress is not good advice -Vasudevan Mukunth

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published Published on Jan 5, 2020   modified Modified on Jan 5, 2020
-TheWire.in

The Narendra Modi government's push to have research institutions depend less on public funds has been turned into a bad idea by the government's own priorities.

“Innovate, patent, produce, prosper.”

Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered these words in his inaugural address at the 107th Indian Science Congress, now underway in Bengaluru. Modi’s prescription (first advanced in early 2018) describes a straightforward path to success but it also quietly assumes an environment and working conditions that are seldom available in the country, not infrequently as a result of his own government’s policies.

Recently, Deccan Herald reported that the National Chemical Laboratory (NCL) in Pune, one of the labs of India’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), had lost no fewer than 12 scientists in the past four years. While Shekhar Mande, the incumbent director general of CSIR, speculated that the exodus could be attributed to various causes, comments from scientists the newspaper spoke to alluded to top-down pressure to focus less on fundamental, and more on applied, research. There have been similar reports coming out of other labs.

This is not the first time a CSIR lab has been in trouble nor will it be the last. The CSIR’s current spate of problems can be traced to 2015, when the directors of the council’s various institutions adopted the ‘Dehradun Declaration’ – a commitment to running their labs by commercialising the patents on their intellectual properties.

But it quickly became clear that they’d bitten off more than they could chew. Girish Sahni, the then director general of CSIR, aspired to raise Rs 1,000 crore per year by 2017, which is a quarter of the labs’ total annual operating expense. However, data released in parliament in March 2018 – around the time India was registering a record 27% growth in patent filings – showed that the organisation had only managed to raise Rs 475 crore per year on average.

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TheWire.in, 3 January, 2020, https://thewire.in/the-sciences/narendra-modi-indian-science-congress-patents-csir-fundamental-research


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