Metascience: Building India’s Capacity to Study Its Own Science System

18 Sep 2026

Tags: Science & Technology   S&T Developments   Technology indigenization

Source: The Hindu

Context: The U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released ‘Science: A New Golden Age’, presenting a renewed vision for American science and drawing on the legacy of Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report, ‘Science: The Endless Frontier’.

• The report highlights a broader issue relevant to India: scientific systems themselves need to be studied through evidence to understand what funding models, institutions and incentives actually deliver results.

What is Metascience?

• Metascience, or the science of science, uses systematic research to understand how scientific research is funded, conducted, evaluated and translated into outcomes.
• It draws upon economics, sociology of science, political science, public policy, organisational studies, scientometrics, and history and philosophy of science.
• Key questions include how research priorities are determined, how funding mechanisms perform, how peer review operates, how researchers are assessed and how incentives shape scientific collaboration.

Why Research Systems Need Self-Evaluation

• Rising research and development (R&D) investment does not automatically guarantee proportional increases in scientific productivity or innovation.
• A mature science system should therefore be capable of using its own data to assess whether its policies, institutions and funding mechanisms are producing the intended outcomes.
• The U.S. report advocates greater support for individual researchers pursuing bold, high-risk ideas rather than concentrating resources mainly in established institutions.
• It also questions a one-size-fits-all funding model and supports experimentation with alternative funding mechanisms.
• Research funding agencies themselves need to evaluate whether their funding models and selection mechanisms are effective.

India’s Metascience Gap

• India has historically relied heavily on the experience, judgement and leadership of eminent scientists to shape its science system.
• Such expertise remains valuable, but the contemporary research ecosystem is substantially more complex and requires systematic, multidisciplinary evidence.
• Between 1950 and 2024, Indian research on metascience and closely related questions remained limited.
• Except for scientometrics, Indian output in these areas was generally only around 1–2% of global research output, with the overall publication count remaining relatively small.

The Problem of Institutional Memory

• Changes in scientific leadership and personnel can result in the loss of knowledge about what worked, what failed and why.
• India has relatively few publicly accessible analytical reports that systematically document the evolution of its research and innovation system.
• Weak institutional memory makes it difficult for successive policymakers to learn from previous programmes and funding decisions.
• Building and preserving such institutional memory is therefore an important component of evidence-based science governance.

Mission-Oriented vs Curiosity-Driven Research

 

Curiosity-Driven Research Curiosity-driven or blue-sky research seeks to answer fundamental questions without requiring an immediate practical application. Quantum mechanics, initially developed to understand fundamental aspects of matter, eventually enabled technologies such as semiconductors, lasers and modern computing. Research in molecular biology contributed decades later to technologies such as CRISPR gene editing and mRNA vaccines. Exploratory work in mathematics and related fields contributed foundational ideas underlying modern artificial intelligence, including neural networks and transformer-based architectures.

Mission-Oriented Research Mission-oriented research directs scientific resources towards clearly defined societal, technological or strategic objectives. The Apollo programme accelerated developments in aerospace engineering, materials science and computing. The Human Genome Project transformed biological research into a coordinated, large-scale international scientific enterprise. India’s Green Revolution combined state support, crop-breeding research and explicit food-security objectives to significantly increase agricultural production. However, the Green Revolution has also been debated in terms of ecological impacts, regional disparities and long-term sustainability.

 

Role of the State in Scientific Innovation

• Economist Mariana Mazzucato, through her work on the “entrepreneurial state”, highlights how governments can undertake long-term, high-risk investments that private actors may initially be unwilling to make.
• Technologies associated with products such as the iPhone, including the internet, Global Positioning System (GPS), touchscreen technology and voice-recognition systems, have roots in publicly funded research.
• Such examples demonstrate that the commercial value of fundamental research may emerge decades after the original investment.
• Excessive emphasis on immediate missions and measurable outcomes may therefore risk reducing investment in research whose applications are not yet foreseeable.

Need for a Balanced Research Strategy

• A resilient research ecosystem requires both mission-oriented research for addressing pressing challenges and curiosity-driven research for creating new scientific frontiers.
• The appropriate balance should be determined through evidence and deliberation, rather than by temporary global research-policy trends.
• Metascience can help assess which funding approaches work best under different circumstances instead of assuming that one model is universally effective.

What India Needs to Do

• Invest not only in scientific research but also in research on the functioning of the science ecosystem itself.
• Establish dedicated institutions, expertise and researchers focused on studying Indian science policy, funding, institutions and incentives.
• Develop systematic databases and analytical frameworks to evaluate research funding, peer review, researcher assessment and scientific collaboration.
• Create mechanisms to preserve institutional learning and policy memory across changes in leadership.
• Evaluate both mission-oriented and curiosity-driven programmes through long-term evidence of scientific, technological, economic and social outcomes.