International research collaboration in India
International research partnerships are popping up all over India. In this article we attempt to sketch a quick overview of the breadth of approaches adopted by the various collaboration initiatives with India globally.
US
The US and India have had research collaboration initiatives in place since the 1950s, when the Fulbright-Nehru program began. Early initiatives were focussed on bringing Indian talent to the US rather than facilitating exchange in both directions.
Collaboration has remained strong since it started. In more recent years, initiatives have turned to focus on STEM, and measures to encourage more Americans to study in India have increased.
The India – US 2 + 2 Ministerial Dialogue in 2019 included a bilateral Science and Technology Agreement to further strengthen commitment to STEM research and innovation, with a particular focus on space research and collaboration.
The US also works closely with India through other organisations such as USAID and the National Science Foundation (NSF). These organisations provide funding and support, respectively in development and science collaboration.
UK
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) opened a New Delhi office in 2008 and has since co-funded research alongside both the Indian and UK government, collectively amounting to over GBP 300 million in funding. In this time, UKRI has helped fund over 250 projects involving over 100 industry partners and 175 research institutions from India and the UK. UKRI works will every key Indian government department involved in funding national research. UKRI reports that the 1,665 publications resulting from UKRI India funded research indexed in Scopus yielded research with twice the global average field-weighted citation impact (2.2).
Two UK-India collaborations were announced as part of UK Foreign Secretary Liz truss’ visit to India last year. Both projects were focussed on telecoms. The UK-India Future Networks Initiative (UKI-FNI) is a GBP 1.4 million project between UK and Indian universities in telecom diversification technologies. A grant of GBP 180,000 was also awarded to the Compound Semiconductor Applications (CSA) catapult, for exploring potential collaboration between the UK and India on the needs of future telecoms networks.
Another major UK international funding agency is the Newton Fund. In India it takes the form of the Newton-Bhabha partnership, established in 2014. The Newton Fund is concerned specifically with research in economic development and social welfare across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Its work in India focuses on the following: sustainable cities and urbanisation; Public health; the energy water food nexus and ocean research.
Japan
India and Japan have had a formal cooperation agreement in science research since 1985. The agreement has been renewed 10 times since then, most recently in November 2020, aligning research goals to the SDGs.
The Indian-Japan Cooperative Science Programme promotes bilateral scientific collaboration between scientists from the two countries, supporting specific areas within the following fields: fundamental Sciences (physical and chemical systems); Materials and System engineering; Life sciences and Biotechnology; and Mathematics and Computational science. In a positive move to assure equity in partnerships, the programme explicitly states that applications must include one Indian and one Japanese principal investigator.
AUS
Australia is increasingly a major partner with India. The Australia – India Strategic Research Fund (AISRF) has run since 2007 and has grown to become Australia’s largest bilateral science collaboration. In its first decade it supported over 300 collaborative projects. AISRF is run by the Australian Government’s Department of Industry, Innovation at Science.
The Australian Research Cooperation Hub India (ARCH India) supports researcher engagement between India and Australia. It is a new initiative, only established in 2021. ARCH India aims to strengthen and increase bilateral collaboration between the two countries through five key objectives: Increasing number of researchers from Indian and Australia collaborating together; identifying sources of funding; increasing awareness of each country’s research strengths; diversifying the reach of research institutions to a wider network; and increasing researcher mobility between the two countries.
Region
While regional collaboration can be strong in some parts of the world, South Asia is the least economically integrated region in the world. This is also the case for research integration and each country has its own system for international collaboration, India and Pakistan being the most integrated into global collaboration networks.
Regionally, the highest level of collaboration is between India and Pakistan, producing 1,532 collaborative publications between 2012 and 2016, 1,532 collaborative publications, according to Elsevier. The next highest country pairing was between India and Nepal, but with 708 it outputs less than half of India-Pakistan collaboration.
The collaboration between India and Pakistan since 2012 is partially a diplomatic effort. Growing out of a summit held in the same year, the partnership is at the heart of easing historical strained relations.
Politics also affects collaboration between Indian and China. In many sense rivals as well as neighbours, research collaboration between the two countries has fluctuated over the years. In 2019, India tightened its rules for collaborating with China. Universities must now have the permission of both the ministries of Home Affairs and External Affairs before signing any MoUs with Chinese partners.
The political nature of country partnerships
Research partnerships can either be built on agreements between countries, or between institutions. When organised through national level agreements, research falls along national interests.
This has both benefits and drawbacks. Partnerships between countries can for example work towards fully utilising national strengths and common national goals. Targeting national goals has the large advantage that it focusses the results of research onto society rather than keeping research within institutions.
Partnerships are however not necessarily matched to institutional common ground. Just because a country partnership pairing is aligned does not mean that every institution within that pairing will be aligned – and vice versa.