Even in 2026, Indian science appears to be plagued by mediocrity. In the scientific world, mediocrity translates to bad research papers. India ranks among the top 3 countries with the most retracted papers. Of the ten universities worldwide from which the most retractions originated, six were from India, according to a 2025 survey. The majority of submissions to predatory journals are from Indians. Even though industrial applications and science-backed innovation for the country have been policy priorities, they haven’t yet materialised on the ground.
Here are five ways to unlock the Indian scientific community’s revolutionary potential.
1. Protect academic freedom and remove barriers to political discourse on campuses
India’s Academic Freedom Index score fell from 0.6 in 2013 to 0.2 in 2023, its lowest since the mid-1940s, and further to 0.16 by 2025, ranking India 156th of 179 countries.
Restricting academic freedom is fundamentally anti-science, as scientific research rests on open exploration. The intensified governmental control over universities and institutions we have seen over the last decade is academically counterproductive, as they limit the free flow of knowledge. [Here are some examples that made it into media reports: Exhibit A and Exhibit B.]
Aniket Sule, Professor at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE-TIFR), Mumbai, has witnessed several instances where the arms of government ministries have reached out to stifle dissenting voices in Indian science. He points to two recent examples: one, when the International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics, hosted in India in 2025, barred Israel from participating; and two, when scientist-signatories from around the country jointly criticised a conference mandatory for IIT Mandi students that included sessions on afterlife, reincarnation, and astrology.
In both these cases, and numerous others, ministers from the ruling party sent enquiries via the Directors of supposedly autonomous institutions about the identities of those who were behind the campaigns and demanded explanations for why such political action was taken, according to Aniket.
There have also been more indirect warnings. Having often raised his voice for academic freedom in India, Aniket knows political discourse is not welcome. “Every time we meet people at some committee meetings or the other, we are orally told that the ministry keeps a tab on all these activities and you better watch out,” he said.
Notes and warnings sent from higher levels of government have succeeded in instilling a climate of fear within the wider scientific community. As Aniket puts it: “80% to 90% of the scientific community that I am aware of don’t buy into the ideology of the government, but it is just that they are too afraid to stand up to their beliefs. Maybe it is fear for a job or fear for promotions or getting directorships somewhere.”
The fear-mongering and restrictions need to be lifted so that the mind of every government employee, scientist, worker, and student is set free.
2. End funding to pseudoscience
India’s scientific progress has suffered gravely from the pseudoscientific thinking that now runs through the government: from the PM’s own fascination with numerology, (see also this more recent satire report by Manisha Pandey on Newslaundry) to NCERT’s 2023 removal of Darwin’s theory of evolution from Class 10 textbooks, to a retired High Court judge’s widely mocked claim that peahens get pregnant by swallowing peacock tears and countless other pseudoscientific pronouncements from people who occupy positions of public authority. Reaching India’s scientific potential would mean rolling back all pseudoscience projects and putting the brakes on the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) centres that now fester inside our IITs and other science institutes. Initiatives under the IKS Division under the Ministry of Education have been very controversial as they seem to advance Hindutva, a right-wing political ideology that wants to establish India as a Hindu state.
As historian of science Meera Nanda has warned, this appropriation of science for the glory of the Vedas is one of the planks on which the myth of Hindu supremacy rests. In the name of national pride, science students are being diverted from the evidence-based tools and concepts they need to solve the problems they’ll face as scientists and engineers.
Meanwhile, India’s R&D spending has stagnated at roughly 0.6–0.7% of GDP for two decades. This is a fraction of the 2.5–5% that innovation-led economies invest.
Indian taxpayers have funded the erosion of their own scientific institutions. This must end.
3. Dismantle upper-caste domination of Indian science institutions
The skewed access to education in Indian society, when seen along with who leads our science institutes and universities and who gets to participate in knowledge-making, makes it clear that upper-caste domination persists in our country’s STEM ecosystem.
Caste sorting begins long before university and continues into higher science education. At the top five IITs and IISc, 98% of professors are from privileged castes, according to Ankur Paliwal’s 2023 investigation for Nature. And at our ‘Institutions of Excellence,’ like institutes under the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), which are exempt from the constitutional guarantee of reservation for lower-caste groups, the situation is similar, if not worse. Adivasis make up under 5% of undergraduate STEM classes in India, and even at the PhD level, Dalit representation across top IITs averages just 10% and Adivasi 2%, both below the mandated 15% and 7.5%.
There is also the human cost to bear. When Dalit and Adivasi students and faculty enter our campuses, they are often met with harassment, sometimes fatally: Rohith Vemula, Payal Tadvi, and many others ended their lives as a result of caste-based harassment in science institutions and institutional apathy. UGC data show discrimination complaints rose by 118% over five years. When UGC tried modest Equity Regulations in response earlier this year, backlash arrived within days, as we are also seeing now with the ‘Reservation Hatao‘ rhetoric.
Tied to the Brahmanical supremacy of knowledge in India is the appointment of pliant Directors of Institutes and Vice-Chancellors, which has been commonplace in the last decade. Leadership across CSIR labs, IITs, IISc, IISERs, Central Universities and other institutes must be transparent and insulated from political patronage. The existing leadership has proved itself unable to engage meaningfully with reservation policies; for example, JNU VC Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit described caste discrimination as a “manufactured reality”.
With thousands of faculty posts nationwide remaining vacant, understaffing itself functions as another mechanism of exclusion.
4. Restore critical thinking by integrating the humanities into the science curriculum.
Indian academia has grown too comfortable with the siloisation between the ‘two-cultures’ of humanities and science. Technical expertise devoid of any understanding of how technology ends up interacting with society still defines Indian STEM education. Integrating the humanities into the science curriculum is essential for building critical minds.
Technological progress doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and if STEM students aren’t equipped to understand that, we will only get more of the status quo — where decades of science-funding priorities haven’t translated into science-powered solutions on the ground.
As Vetti Giri, a science education faculty member in the School of Education at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, put it in a Labhopping interview, “If students are exposed to the idea that knowledge-making and knowledge-holding are social and political processes, then they will be critical about the nature of information.”
A working alternative can be seen in China. Science and the humanities need not compete, argues Vice-Dean of ShanghaiTech Institute of Humanities Xin Fan in a recent Nature commentary. He points to ShanghaiTech’s own investment in both since 2013. The world “needs humanities research to understand the reasons and implications” behind fast-moving science, he argues.
As AI reshapes labour, medicine, and information itself, the students holding the technical keys need the ethical and historical grounding to use them responsibly.
5. Above all: Ensure transparency and accountability
Every step collapses without this one. The main criticisms of the National Education Policy (2020) have focused on the centralisation and privatisation of education. Centralisation and privatisation aren’t separate problems but the same problem twice, concentrating decision-making where the public can’t see it, whether in Delhi or in an unaccountable institutional boardroom.
It needs to be made clear in science departments around the country that transparency isn’t a bureaucratic nicety but the precondition for enforcing every other step to progress.
For the last decade, government-backed attempts to reform Indian science have been limited to initiatives that are released with much fanfare but soon disappear behind opaque operations, funding and hiring. Looking back, only a graveyard of schemes is seen; the tombstones are etched with acronyms making up Sanskrit-sounding words.
Lying alongside these schemes are all our scientific aspirations.
Note: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or position of the publication. One version of this article was published on Frontline. The featured image is based on original artwork by Ayesha Punjabi.
