India's ministry of human resource development has said that research fellowship salaries will be increased across the board, as initially promised in October, in response to widespread student protests.
The announcement on 2 March was welcomed by researchers, but many also said that it was not enough: some agencies are still stalling, and not all have agreed to backdate the increases to October.
A week of student protests in the run-up to the announcement was triggered by the finance minister Arun Jaitley presenting the national budget on 28 February, India’s national science day. Jaitley was immediately criticised by scientists for not raising the level of research funding sufficiently in his first full budget as finance minister, and for not dealing with the issue of the promised salary increases not being implemented.
The budget contains a modest rise in research funding of 3.4 per cent, taking it to 419 billion rupees ($6.7bn). But one senior scientist told Nature that departments needed a rise of about 15 per cent. Jaitley’s main science announcement was the creation of the Atal Innovation Mission, a programme worth Rs1.5bn that aims to create innovation hubs and joint projects between academics and companies.
Students responded to the budget announcement by staging hunger strikes and street protests, and taking to Twitter to target Smriti Irani, the minister for human resource development, which includes education. Many called for her resignation, with one tweet saying that overseeing funding for PhD studentships was "not her cup of tea".
India’s early-career scholars and PhD students were informed in October that they would receive an increase in their stipends of about 50 per cent—a move they had been calling for for a year because their stipends had not been rising in line with inflation. Monthly salaries for junior research fellowships were to be increased from Rs16,000 to Rs25,000, and those for senior research fellowships were to rise from Rs18,000 to Rs28,000.
But none of the government ministries or departments that fund PhDs implemented the changes at the time. The University Grants Commission did implement the raises in December, but the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, which employs about 5,000 PhD students, has still not done so. The secretary of the department of biotechnology, Vijay Raghavan, has said that the CSIR is "sorting out the budget process" and that students should hear more soon.
Pankaj Jain, a PhD student in molecular biophysics at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, says students are considering further walkouts and protests to get the government to listen to their demands. He says junior researchers will move abroad if the government doesn’t ensure that the salary raises are implemented across the board. "I don’t think the government has any right to cry about brain drain," he says.
And Kush Tripathi, a PhD student in biomedical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, says the government’s handling of research funding shows that it does not recognise the centrality of science to the prime minister’s wider economic plan. "The government doesn’t see R&D as a primary objective," says Tripathi. "Right now the government’s primary goal is to give impetus to the industrial side rather than the R&D."
Image credit: Adam Smith