New Delhi: The 'Aam Admi' budget which saw pious pronouncements being made about how important health and agriculture are for the growth of the country, ironically neglected boosting research in these vital two sectors.
Medical and agricultural research did not find favour with Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee as the government support has remained at last year's level.
In a year when there are already mounting fears of a 'below normal' monsoon, the Department of Agricultural Research and Education got no increase from its allocation of Rs 1,760 crores in the last fiscal.
In his wish list Mukherjee emphasized that Indian agriculture should continue to grow at an annual rate of 4 per cent as it provided sustenance to 60 per cent of India's workforce. But how can it, unless new research is supported? Very soon food grain production will not be able to keep pace with the growing population.
Medical negligence
The newly created Department of Health Research got no budget increase; it continues to get sub-optimal funding at Rs 420 crores, this oversight becomes glaring as the country grapples with a rapidly spreading pandemic of Swine Flu.
There was not even a mention of any allocation being made towards developing a vaccine against Swine Flu. If you think that was glaring, the funding for 'developing tools for preventing epidemics and outbreaks' has actually been scaled back by 80 per cent.
Some hope
Amidst this gloom, the government has continued to support science even as the world is in the midst of an economic downturn. The newly elected government upped the budgets for other science agencies by about 12 per cent, as compared to the outlays for the last fiscal. India spends about $2.5 billion on R&D every year.
Institutions to gain include the agencies that study India's forests; and maintain databases of the animal and plant diversity they have got a special one time grant of Rs 130 crores for upgrading laboratories.
Soon an Indian astronaut!
Funding for India's efforts to launch a human into space has gotten a sharp 84 per cent increase in funding reaching to Rs 230 crores for this fiscal even as a formal proposal to launch two astronauts into a 400 kilometer low Earth orbit still awaits a formal nod from the government. 'I am happy with this continued support' says Dr G Madhavan Nair, chairman, Indian Space Research Organization, Bangalore who said this was symptomatic of the typical `S' curve approach to funding adopted by the Indian government, it starts with a trickle; rising rapidly; then tapering off.
Nair hopes to launch Indians into space from Sriharikota, using indigenous rockets 8 years after the government writes of the full Rs 12,500 crores he seeks for this effort.
No big-ticket new announcements were made for supporting research, and yet the scientific community is still applauding the government's efforts since they feared things could have gotten worse due to the global recession. 'No complaints with the reasonable increases' says Dr T Ramasami, Secretary of the Department of Science and Technology, New Delhi, who pointed out that the world over science budgets are actually flagging due to the economic meltdown, yet at least in India they are still rising, who felt the government has given a message 'it values knowledge generation and innovation'.