Four decades ago, significant discoveries were numerous, but most occurred in the well-established economies of Europe and North America. In 1973, about two-thirds of the nearly 400,000 research publications had an author in one of the G7 countries.
Today, this has changed dramatically. Four times as many documents - more than 1.75 million journal publications - are being indexed, and barely half will have a G7 author. A significant part of the change is attributable to rapid research growth in five countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Korea.
India prides itself in having one of the largest technical manpower in the world. Noting that the country would have to depend on technologies derived from Indian science to improve its innovativeness index, Applied & fundamental research is the crying need of the nation to foster research culture in our academia and universities.
The first and foremost challenge that confronts the government is of encouraging enough people to take up research. With fewer researchers, the country of over 1.2 billion people has one of the lowest of scientific workforce, ranking even below Chile, Kenya including the US and UK when it comes to research workforce density in the labour population. This has a direct impact on the number of patents and research paper India puts out. During the decade 2003-12 the citation impact rose from about half to three quarters of the world average. And yet, while India’s contribution of highly cited papers, as a percentage of total output, has improved, it has remained stubbornly low, achieving by 2011 only about half of the 1% expected (the definition of highly cited papers). There is much good scientific research in India but a seeming dearth of contributions at the highest level, when measured by citation impact.
If India wants to position itself as an economic superpower in the coming decades, there is a serious amount of work to be done and a lot of ground to cover especially in research and development. India needs a substantial number of researchers to do basic research that lead to the generation of new knowledge necessary to increase productivity of educational, business and industrial organizations. India needs to advance the research agenda by working in collaboration with academia, society and industry. Interdependence between these three is a must for any kind of research output. Only an organization that works with a collaborative model between academia, government and corporate can make it possible and that is the reason why ICT Academy’s, one of the pillar is Research and Publications.