The U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) recently released a 125-page policy document titled ‘Science: A New Golden Age’, which presents a renewed vision for American science. It positions itself as a sequel to the American inventor Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report, ‘Science: The Endless Frontier’, which laid the foundations of the famously successful post-war American research system.
As it happens, the new report can be consequential for the Indian science system as well — by revealing the importance of something that India currently does not have but should as quickly as possible: the ability to study its own science system with evidence.
Why a system works
The report starts with a diagnosis well known to the science-of-science, or metascience, research community: despite sustained increases in research and development investment, returns in scientific productivity and innovation have not kept pace. But more than agreement or disagreement with this diagnosis, what matters is that a system should be able to interrogate itself using its own data and be able to reach a conclusion like this.
After its diagnosis, the report draws two conclusions worth exploring. First, it says the U.S. should invest more in individual researchers with bold, high-risk ideas rather than routing funds primarily through what it calls “legacy institutions”. Second, it calls into question the prevailing one-size-fits-all model of research funding, instead advocating for experimenting with alternative funding mechanisms. It also calls for funding agencies to evaluate whether their own mechanisms can be made more effective.
The institutions that fund science should be accountable for the evidence that what they fund and why are actually working — and not just in the U.S. Across Europe, the U.K., China, and Japan, governments and funders are investing seriously in metascience that is able to address this concern. Governments and the people need concrete answers to how their research systems actually function: specifically, how it sets funding priorities, how funding mechanisms perform, how peer-review behaves, how it assesses researchers, how its incentives affect the way scientists collaborate, and so on.
Building a memory
In India, this conversation has barely begun. The country’s science system has historically been shaped by the experience, judgment, and leadership of eminent scientists. That experience is invaluable and must remain a source of evidence — but it is also no longer sufficient considering today’s research ecosystem is far more complex than it was half a century ago, and understanding it requires systematic analysis. Specifically, it needs to draw on economics, the sociology of science, political science, public policy, organisational studies, scientometrics, and history and philosophy.
An exploration of bibliographic databases shows that, between 1950 and 2024, Indian publications addressing metascience or closely related questions across these domains remained low. Except for scientometrics, Indian research in these areas accounted for only around 1-2% of global research output, with the total number of publications generally not exceeding a hundred over the entire period.
A related problem is institutional memory. As leadership and personnel change, experiential knowledge about what worked, what failed, and why is lost. India has very few publicly available analytical reports documenting the evolution of its research system, and little that carries institutional learning across successive generations of policymakers. Building that memory is itself part of building better science governance, and it is where metascience can have a significant impact.
For these reasons, India needs to invest in scientific research as well as in the capacity to study the ecosystem in which this research happens.
Reason of state
The OSTP report also called for setting clearer national scientific goals to streamline research efforts and speed up the translation of discoveries into technologies, including those for society’s benefit. This, too, is worth taking seriously but also debating carefully because it understates how much of transformative science begins without any defined mission at all, i.e. as curiosity-driven research. And this, again, is precisely the kind of question a meaningful metascience capacity would allow India to debate with evidence rather than insights alone.
Quantum mechanics emerged in the early 20th century to answer fundamental questions about the nature of matter. It later became the foundation of semiconductors, lasers, and modern computing. Decades of curiosity-driven research in molecular biology, with no application in sight, eventually made CRISPR gene-editing and mRNA vaccines possible. The mathematics underlying today’s artificial intelligence — including neural networks and transformer architectures — emerged from exploratory research in statistical mechanics.
The economist Mariana Mazzucato has documented this pattern in her work on what she calls “the entrepreneurial state”. She has shown that many of the technologies in a single iPhone, including the internet, GPS, touchscreen, and the voice-recognition algorithms behind Siri, have their roots in blue-sky research funded by U.S. federal agencies such as DARPA and the National Institutes of Health. All these were undertaken decades before any company saw commercial application potential in them. In her account, the state was a bold and patient investor that was absorbing risks no private venture would touch. This is the kind of long-horizon, curiosity-driven investment that a purely ‘mission and metrics’ approach to funding — like what increasingly prevails in India today — risks crowding out.
But at the same time, mission-oriented research has its own record of delivery. The Apollo programme forced rapid advances in aerospace engineering, materials science, and computing that spread far beyond the space race. The Human Genome Project turned biology into a coordinated, global, infrastructure-scale enterprise. India itself had the Green Revolution, where crop-breeding research backed by state investment and clear food-security goals transformed the country’s relationship with hunger within a single generation. The Revolution has its own legitimate critics as well, regarding ecological costs, regional inequity, and long-term sustainability. But that very disagreement also makes the case for India to be able to evaluate a mission using evidence.
Striking the balance
A healthy research ecosystem may well need both approaches to research, with research on a mission being used to meet pressing challenges and curiosity-driven, blue-sky research to open new frontiers. It is just that any decision on where to strike that balance should rest on deliberation and evidence, rather than on which topics happen to be fashionable in global policy discourse at a given moment.
To facilitate that, India needs to invest in metascience, in institutions, expertise, and people whose job is to study how Indian science actually works. It means documenting what has worked and what has not, instead of forgetting it with every change in leadership, and building institutions strong enough to imagine an ambitious future for Indian science.
Moumita Koley is a senior research analyst at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru.
Published – September 16, 2026 09:30 am IST
