According to an estimate India has nearly 2 lacs researchers, of 14% are women. In terms of per thousand researchers, India has only 4 scholars, which is far behind even from Kenya (6) and Chile (7). America and Britain have 79 scholar per thousand people.
As compared to 2001, India published four times more research papers, yet it was still far behind from Brazil and China.
These figures are grim indication of our status in scientific endeavour related investments and expenditure.
If india is to take lead in the 21 century, which is also touted as the 'Century of india' by our leadership, the fraction of GDP that goes into science education and research needs to increase consistently over a couple of decade.
The modern research infrastructure needs to be installed in the educational and training institutions. Training of the young population of the country, starting from high school to post gratuates levels, is mandatory in order to exploit the demographic dividend that the country has today.
We lost the opportunity during industrial revolution and still facing the stigma of backwardness. We are facing the danger of lost opportunity yet again lest we did enough to utilise energy of our young population for building a scintific momentum by educating and training our youths. This needs to be done sooner than later as we are already lagging far behind as evident by the information shared above.
(Information source: Patrika)
