The Anusandhan National Research Foundation and the BioE3 (Biotechnology for Economy, Environment and Employment) policy are the right ways of moving towards a bio-based economy linked to a strong partnership between academia and industry. Photo: serb.gov.in

India’s new PPP initiative, the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), established to promote research and development, and the recently announced BioE3 (Biotechnology for Economy, Environment and Employment) policy emphasise the need for academia-industry partnership; and the role of the bioeconomy in driving the economy while honouring India’s commitment to sustainable development and climate action. Specifically, the BioE3 policy notes the need to convert chemical-based industries to sustainable bio-based industrial models. It also provides an opportunity to revisit the impact of new technologies on existing industries such as Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCGs).

Reducing palm oil in soap

The soap industry globally, for example, is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and loss of biodiversity. The manufacturing of soap depends heavily on palm oil. About 90% of palm plantations are grown in Borneo, Sumatra, and the Malay Peninsula, where its lucrative production has led to replacing forested lands with palm oil fields. Although this deforestation has been well documented, replacing palm oil in soaps and other FMCG products has been difficult. For one, palm has relatively higher yields as compared with other vegetable oils, making it more lucrative for farmers and cheaper for consumers. Palm oil also accounts for about 40% of the global annual demand for vegetable oil.

However, new emerging technologies may provide avenues to replace or at least reduce palm oil consumption in soaps. Palm oil is the primary source of fatty acids that perform two functions in a soap bar —15-20% of the lower chain fatty acids contribute to the surfactant/cleansing function of the soap, while most of the longer chain fatty acids only provide structure to the bar. Synthetic biotechnologies may be able to create artificial fatty acid chains that can replace the functionalities of palm oil, particularly those providing structure to the bar. Alternately, the so-called ‘structuring portion of the Total Fatty Matter’, which provides no consumer benefit, could be replaced with other local plant or bio-based materials such as plant-based polysaccharides. Additionally, with the total amount of ‘hard soap’ reduced, other benefit agents like antimicrobial peptides or other biologically active molecules could be added to the soap bar to improve its germ-protection function or preferably molecules which boost the skin’s immunity and provide germ protection.

This will require strong support from government and civil society. It would mean the development of solutions across the soap value chain, be it bio-based or bio-synthetic materials that could replicate the brick-and-mortar structure of the soap bar or packaging innovations that can reduce/eliminate plastic use. The recent PPP initiative under ANRF, linked seamlessly with the BioE3 policy, could support such partnerships through funding and by recognising the need to reinvent legacy products in addition to introducing new ones.

Locally grown palm oil

Until bio-synthetic or bio-engineered products become a reality, every day-use products like soaps will depend on domestic and international sustainable palm oil plantations. The Government of India launched the National Mission on Edible Oils-Oil Palm in August 2021 with the aim of increasing the oil palm production area to 10 lakh ha. and boosting crude palm oil production to 11.20 lakh tonnes by 2025-26. It is important that such plantations not only adhere to the policy of ‘No Deforestation, No Peat’, but that they are also carefully selected so that they don’t disrupt the surrounding biodiversity. A comprehensive ecological research programme to understand the long-term impact of these monocultures in the context of India’s biodiversity is also a strong need, along with regenerative agriculture practices, working with smallholder farmers.

The purchase of locally grown sustainable palm oil and investments in innovation to replace imported palm oil come at a cost, which, when borne by the company, may have to be passed onto the consumer. In a competitive market, this can mean the loss of market share. Government support through funding for research or other fiscal incentives encourage such sustainable practices and help companies innovate in this space.

Finally, the move to reduce palm oil use in soaps will require regulatory support. Current toilet soap grades are decided based on the fatty material present in the soap. This creates a false equivalency in the government’s and consumer’s mind that the higher the fatty material in the soap, the better the product’s quality. Many publications disprove of this. Regulatory requirements for soap grades should move away from this old ‘vertical’ compositional standard based on a single material and embrace more horizontal and performance-based standards as those which exist in developed markets and incentivise newer technologies and methodologies linked to consumer benefit, product safety, and environmental sustainability. Furthermore, mandatory labelling of products on a sustainability scale based on their procurement and production practices can also help consumers make informed decisions.

The ANRF and the BioE3 policy are the right ways of moving towards a bio-based economy linked to a strong partnership between academia and industry. Products of everyday use might be a great first place to start, to make a real impact in terms of being both sustainable and self-reliant

Shambhavi Naik, Takshashila Institution, Bengaluru. Views are personal; L.S. Shashidhara, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru. Views are personal

Image for representation.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images

In 2023, the government did away with a bevy of awards conferred to scientists by the science ministries and their various institutes and departments. The decision was polarising but many, including outside the government, argued in favour of the move saying there were just too many awards and the decision-making for most of them had become so opaque as to render them a lottery.

In their place the government installed the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar (RVP), a more finite set of awards in specific categories and with well-defined eligibility criteria. Most importantly, the government said that each year’s awardees would be determined by a bespoke committee led by scientists of good standing, acknowledging that it had heard scientists’ concerns about opacity and bureaucratic interference.

Also Read | Centre changes award schedule of Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar

Changes overnight

However, on August 7 this year, when the government announced the awards’ inaugural winners, it emerged that some scientists who had been included by the committee in the list sent to the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) had been omitted from the list publicised by the government. The question was whether anyone had modified the list between the PSA’s office and the press office, with most fingers pointing towards ministers as they have the requisite power to do so.

When journalists asked the PSA about the list, he said all the procedures stipulated on the RVP website had been followed. This alerted the people to a second oddity: the page displaying the procedures was different from the earlier page, which could be accessed using the Internet Archive service. It had been modified on the night before the PSA’s comment, to include a new rule: that the head of the RVP committee would “recommend” the final list to the Science Ministry. Until then, the head of the committee had the power to finalise the awardees.

In effect, the government had abolished the previous set of awards to institute new ones more amenable to its control. Even if this is conjecture, we cannot ignore an important characteristic of all awards: they are dignified by their laureates, not the other way around. All the scientists who had been been excluded from the final list had one commonality: they had publicly opposed some government policy or the other.

If the RVP awards had been conferred upon them, the awards — and the government — would have become distinguished in return. But the coalition led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the Centre has in effect admitted that it is threatened by scientists who exercise their democratic rights by signing protest petitions and publishing articles in the press scrutinising policies and laws.

The government has been trying repeatedly to shut this threat once and for all — and failing. The threat is specifically the opposition to its policies and world view emanating from academia, a space the Hindutva programme has thus far failed to breach by choking funding and revenue through the Finance Ministry and provisions of the Foreign Contributions (Regulations) Act, using bad science or pseudoscience, interfering in administrative matters, and even using violence. The last count includes the police raid of the Jamia Millia Islamia in 2019; violence meted out by Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad members against Jawaharlal Nehru University students in 2020; the prolonged incarceration of professors in the Elgar Parishad case; and the murders of Gauri Lankesh, Narendra Dabholkar, and Govind Pansare.

EDITORIAL | Broadening the field: On science awards and the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize winners

‘Alternative’ scholarship

This said, nothing illustrates the ham-fisted character of the government’s attempts, which err fundamentally by failing to understand the power of good scholarship and the spirit of studentship, as clearly as the sites of ‘alternative’ scholarship it has set up. The purpose of these sites appears to be to realise or sustain the plausibility of the claims of the Hindutva political project. One in particular is that the Aryans were natives of the subcontinent. This is contrary to what scientists have been finding: that the Aryans were immigrants from West Asia and that the Indus Valley Civilisation and other civilisational settlements in the region preceded their arrival.

In 2021, an ‘Indian Knowledge Systems Centre’ at IIT Kharagpur published a “Vedic calendar” full of fanciful attempts to reinterpret symbols found at Indus Valley sites. Thus, the famous Pashupati seal found in Mohenjo-Daro became a “Vedic-Puranic Shiva”. In 2022, IIT Kanpur said Sri Sri Ravishankar would induct new students that year. A few days later the University Grants Commission asked universities to organise lectures on Constitution Day touting India had a democratic government in its Vedic era. Last year, the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi asked its staff to attend talks about “medical science and Indian scriptures”; separately, the Indian Space Research Organisation chairman, S. Somanath, called Sanskrit a language well-suited for machine learning. IIT Mandi director Laxmidhar Behera has blamed meat-eating for landslides.

Having failed at political capture from the outside, the BJP has been taking the inside-out route. The RVP awards seem like an attempt to bring scholars in line by hijacking their reward mechanisms. In a few years, stewardship of the awarding process is to be transferred to the Anusandhan National Research Foundation, which will also regulate all research and development activities in the country. Yet one hopes that scholars’ continued willingness to speak up against peculiarities in the awards’ selection process will help undo the government’s control impulse.

mukunth.v@thehindu.co.in

The executive and governing boards of the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) — a high-level body conceived to give strategic direction to scientific research in India — has no representation from Indian industry, suggests a perusal of the list of members made public by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST) earlier this week. There is also no presence of State universities, who the ANRF had said would be among the major beneficiaries of the new structure.

The absence of Indian industry is glaring as the ANRF Act, passed in August 2023, was expected to galvanise research by having close to ₹36,000 crore or 70% of its five-year outlay of ₹50,000 crore from “non-government sources, industry & philanthropists, from domestic as well as outside sources”, Science Minister Jitendra Singh had said in discussions surrounding the passage of the Bill in Parliament last year.

To this end, the text of the Act specifically empowered the President of the Governing Board — in this case the Prime Minister of India — to nominate or appoint up to “…five members from business organisation or industry”, into the Board.

The 15-member Governing Board, as notified by the MoST, however, has only one industrialist — Romesh Wadhwani, an American billionaire of Indian origin and former CEO and chairperson of the Symphony Technology Group. There are two other Americans with Indian roots — Manjul Bhargava, Professor, Princeton University, U.S.; and Subra Suresh, Professor at Large, Brown University and former head of the U.S. National Research Foundation, from which the ANRF draws inspiration.

Only two universities are represented in the body by the Directors of the Indian Institute of Science, and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Ajay Sood, Principal Scientific Advisor to the Union government, is the Member Secretary of the governing body, with the rest of the members comprising the Ministers of Science, and Education, and the Secretaries of the departments under the MoST.

The ANRF replaces the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), established in 2008. Similar to the ANRF, it was set up by the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government to give strategic direction to technological research. Chaired by the Secretary of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), it too lacked the representation of State universities but it had, among others, representation from the Indian Institutes of Technology; the Chancellors of Nalanda University, and the Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra; and one representative from Intel India as a representative of industry.

The ANRF is a significant reform in that it proposes a more expansive definition of research, which includes science, engineering, Information Technology, Liberal Arts, Social Sciences and the Humanities — the ANRF Board has among its members Raghuvendra Tanwar, Chair, Indian Council of Historical Research. The SERB only envisaged funding research, whereas the NRF can fund and receive money from private sources, and philanthropic and international organisations. With the repeal of the SERB, all the funds available to that organisation would now be available to the NRF. The ANRF was earmarked ₹2,000 crore for the 2024-2025 financial year. The Hindu reached out via text messages to the Dr. Sood, and Abhay Karandikar, Secretary, DST for comment on the exclusion of Indian industrialists from the Board. Dr. Karandikar cited the presence of Dr. Wadhwani as an example of industry participation.

A senior scientist privy to the gestation of the ANRF said that the ANRF was originally envisioned as having “minimal” representation of Secretaries of various Ministries, and a more “dynamic” board. “Politically, there was full support for a drastic rehaul of the SERB but the scientific establishment, particularly the Ministries, did not want too much change (from the SERB structure). That said, this is a start and the existing structure is flexible, too. If it delivers on being able to spend ₹2,000 crore this year and gets 70% (₹36,000 crore external funding), then it’s a success,” this person said on condition of anonymity.

Only 36% of India’s research expenditure of roughly ₹1.2 lakh crore came from the private sector in 2019-20, when the latest such figures were published. This is one of the reasons why India’s expenditure on R&D hovers around 0.6% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), well below the 1-2% that is characteristic of countries with a stronger science and technology infrastructure, and the global average of 1.8%.

In China, Japan, South Korea and the U.S., the private sector contributed 70% of the research expenditure. About 70% of India’s research funds were taken up by the Defence Research and Development Organisation, the Department of Space, the Department of Atomic Energy, and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research. The Ministry of Science and Technology, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, and the Indian Council of Medical Research garnered about 20%.

Union Minister of State for Science and Technology Jitendra Singh in Parliament on February 06, 2024.

The Centre on Monday said that provisions of the newly constituted research board, Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), had come into effect and announced the appointment of Abhay Karandikar, Secretary, Department of Science and Technology (DST), as interim CEO of the body on Tuesday.

The ANRF aims to be a research funding organisation that will have a corpus of ₹50,000 crore at the outset with nearly ₹36,000 crore projected to come from the private sector. The aim of this new funding body is to “…provide high level strategic direction for research, innovation and entrepreneurship in the fields of natural sciences including mathematical sciences, engineering and technology, environmental and earth sciences, health and agriculture, and scientific and technological interfaces of humanities and social sciences…”

The DST in a press statement on Tuesday said that “…provisions of the ANRF Act had been brought into force on February 5, 2024”.  Earlier this week, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman provisioned ₹2,000 crore towards the ANRF for the financial year 2024-25.

The ANRF Act was passed by both Houses of Parliament in 2023. However, the ‘rules’ accompanying the text of the Act are yet to be made public. Mr. Karandikar told The Hindu that the rules had been “notified” and would be done “30 days after public notification”.

“The ANRF act coming into force is a heartening piece of news for scientists, researchers, innovators and startups. For the first time after Independence, under the leadership of the Honourable PM Shri Narendra Modi, India now has a National Research Foundation called Anusandhan”, said, Mr. Jitendra Singh, Science Minister, posted on X on Tuesday.

The Department of Science and Technology (DST) would be the administrative department of NRF and led by a Governing Board consisting of eminent researchers and professionals across disciplines. The Prime Minister will be the ex-officio President of the Board and the Union Minister of Science & Technology & Union Minister of Education will be the ex-officio Vice-Presidents. NRF’s functioning will be governed by an Executive Council chaired by the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India.

The ANRF subsumes the existing Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), established in 2008, and in many respects identical to the ANRF. The rationale is that the ANRF had an “…expanded mandate and covers activities over and above the activities of SERB,” the press statement added.