Setting Benchmarks! India's Scholarly Output In Scientific Publications Climbs To 3rd Rank Globally, Says Report

India is widely considered to be a repository of scientific findings and experts. Numerous studies and publications across the nation continue to challenge the global understanding of multiple concepts. Establishing this fact with official numbers, the science and technology minister Jitendra Singh announced that India's scholarly output in scientific publications has climbed to the third position worldwide. This is a leap from India's seventh position in 2010, per data collated by the US-based National Science Foundation.

Stepping Up Global Performance

As of 2020, India holds the third position across the world in terms of output in scientific publications. The minister quoted the latest ranking report released by the US-based National Science Foundation (NSF) to convey that the country has progressed over the past decade and moved four steps ahead from the earlier seventh position.

The NSF is an independent agency of the US government that supports fundamental research and education in all non-medical fields of science and engineering. Their numbers suggest that India's scientific output increased to 1,49,213 scientific papers in 2020 from 60,555 publications in 2010. Minister Singh praised the scientific progress and said that India's research performance has improved significantly over the years and that it has been made visible through the global index.

Encouraging Researchers Into STEM

In his speech, Singh credited the government for adopting measures that encouraged and enabled many researchers to study their interests and take them to a global level. According to a report by the Hindustan Times, some of the government steps cited by Singh are - successive increases in allocations for scientific departments, incentivising investment by private sectors, improving ease of doing business in science, technology, and innovation-related activities, introducing flexible tools for public procurement, creating avenues for collaborative funding through portfolio-based funding mechanisms such as public-private partnerships (PPP) and other innovative hybrid funding mechanisms.

Adding to it, he stated that patents granted by the India Patent Office in the past three years alone have increased from 2,511 in 2018-19 to 5,629 in 2020-21. The department received funding of ₹ 6,002 crores in the last budget, out of which 42 per cent was allocated to the science and technology ministry, 40 per cent to the department of scientific and industrial research, and 18 per cent to the department of biotechnology. In the upcoming 2023-24 budget, the department is expected to receive 20 per cent additional funding, which is further expected to improve the scientific presence of India on a global scale.

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