India underinvests in science

Unless we build more than simply two or three global centres of scientific excellence and training, and unless we reward our scientists to work in those institutions, it will be hard for us to compete with countries like China, informs Dr Swami Subramaniam, CEO, Ignite Life Science Foundation to Akanki Sharma in an exclusive interview

- Akanki Sharma

Give us a brief about Ignite Life Science Foundation - the story of its origin, its goal and target audience, etc.

Ignite was launched formally at an event in January 2020 but its story had begun prior to that. It is the brainchild of Professor Ramaswamy Subramanian, who was at that time heading C-CAMP in Bengaluru - a part of the Bangalore biocluster. During his working years in India, he recognised many problems Indian scientists were facing and it was not simply a matter of quantum of funding; there were multiple factors.

Research productivity thrives in a complex ecosystem. Very few countries in the world have succeeded in building such self-sustaining ecosystems consisting of multiple factors -government funding, academic institutions (that are often private) that consider research an important purpose for their existence, ability to attract the best students from the global pool, private philanthropists willing to support science through large endowments and the co-existence of research universities with communities of investors, start-ups and large company R&D facilities The Boston-Cambridge (Harvard) area and the San Francisco Bay Area (Stanford), Cambridge University (Cambridge, UK) and the Stockholm area (Stockholm University) are some examples.

Building out such ecosystems takes time, but Rams and his scientific peers got together with leading business persons and academics in India to find Ignite as an organisation that would nurture good science using philanthropic money. Connecting uHNIs to science in Indian universities is the first step towards getting widespread acknowledgement of the challenges facing Indian science and pooling resources and capabilities to solve some of these challenges - funding is only one among those.