Stop launching pigeons, start measuring impact

A mature research ecosystem does not simply fund discovery. It converts discovery into national capability.

- ADITYA SINHA & APARAJITA MARWAH.

During World War II, the US military funded one of the most absurd experiments in defence research, Project Pigeon. Conceived by the psychologist B.F. Skinner, the idea was to train pigeons to peck at the image of an enemy ship projected inside a missile’s nose cone, thus steering the bomb toward its target.

The birds performed flawlessly in trials. Yet the Pentagon balked at trusting a $25,000 warhead toa pigeon. The project was quietly abandoned, ingenious in design, but irrelevant in outcome. It is a story that perfectly captures the perils of mistaking experimentation for impact. As India begins to invest more heavily in research and frontier technologies, it becomes important how well we can trace what that spending actually achieves.

Thousands of projects are financed annually, but few can be traced to products, policies, or patents that transformed markets. A filed patent is not commercialization. A prototype is not adoption. What India lacks isa theory of change, a system to causally link research inputs to national outcomes, supported by a digital infrastructure that can measure, monitor, and enable course correction.

A credible theory of change begins with five traceable stages, inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impact. Inputs are grants, infrastructure, and talent. Activities encompass experimentation, design, and testing. Outputs are tangible results, papers, patents, standards, prototypes. Outcomes should gauge whether the innovation diffused, reduced import dependence, or generated jobs. Impact captures structural transformation. Has it strengthened sovereignty, competitiveness, or resilience? This causal chain should be the operating code of Indian science policy, not an afterthought in evaluation reports.