The buffalo that would be a tiger

What is it like doing science in India? Let me make the operating rules clear before I answer. Every question about India has two ‘correct’ answers which say exactly opposite things. Furthermore, each of the one billion Indians will disagree with one another and with what any outsider has to say about India. Being a scientist in India is wonderful. Really. Every good grant proposal gets funded. Everyone is pretty much tenured. You can’t get fired, even if you do not come to work — ever. The students are great (this is true). Your colleagues are supportive. And every day is a surprise; anything can happen, and does. Let me elaborate on some of these points. Most Indian biologists submit grant proposals to the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and/or the Department of Biotechnology (DBT). Although government support has, unfortunately, declined substantially in real terms, DST and DBT committees will recommend funding for every good proposal. In addition, review committees often help revise poorly rated proposals and get them to fundable quality. On the down side, levels of funding are usually not optimal and grant cheques are often slow in coming. Most research and teaching positions are tenured, yet, for the most part, this does not lead to complacency; it is impressive how much effort many scientists in poorly equipped and poorly funded places put into their work. Unfortunately, because changing jobs is virtually unknown, there is a certain amount of stagnation. Even in the reputedly very good institutions there is a very wide range in the quality of scientists, and a significant minority of ‘career committee-members’, whose sole purpose seems to be to encumber intellectual activity. For a country in which superstition and credulity are part of daily life, there is a strong respect for science in India. Encouragingly, applications for doctoral positions in biology have increased enormously in the past few years, perhaps because the growing Indian middle class sees biology and biotechnology as areas of opportunity. But this boom has been concentrated on the elite research institutes or the few high-profile universities. Many excellent university-based researchers have difficulty in attracting top students, largely because of the cumbersome bureaucracy I mentioned and the failure of most universities to recruit nationally rather than regionally.