Low funding for postdoc roles fuelling brain drain, govt. funds only 2,500 positions

Walk into MIT, Stanford, Caltech, or Bell Labs, and you will find Indian-origin scientists driving quantum computing, mRNA therapeutics, agentic AI, and graphics processor design. They run corporate research divisions, win Nobel Prizes, and turn lab prototypes into trillion-dollar companies.

Their schooling, their instincts, their work ethic—all of them trace back to India. So why does the same talent pool, often from the very same graduating batch, hit an invisible wall the moment it walks into a research lab back home?

It isn’t talent. It isn’t ambition. It’s the ecosystem. In the U.S., a young researcher gets multi-year grants that don’t vanish overnight, an administration that trusts rather than audits every rupee, freedom to move between university and start-up, and a culture that actually celebrates the risky bet.

In India, the same researcher gets trapped in a paper fortress — lacking a financial budget, scholarships that show up five months late, struggling over procedures just to buy test tubes, and the annual March 31 guillotine when unspent funds simply disappear.

We are trapping our sharpest minds in mundane concerns instead of letting them pursue scientific revolutions. Elsevier’s 2025 study, Researcher of the Future, which surveyed over 3,200 scientists across 113 countries, found 68% grappling with rising publish-or-perish pressure, barely 45% with any protected research time, and only a third expecting funding to grow.

And yet Indian researchers stand apart in one heartening way: 81% insist their work must produce real societal benefit, and 68% are optimistic about funding — the highest of any country surveyed. For over two decades, India’s gross expenditure on R&D has stagnated at 0.64–0.65% of GDP.

China spends 2.4–2.6%, the U.S. 3.5%, and South Korea over 5%. Per person, India puts in about $13 a year on research; China spends $250, the U.S. over $2,100. And we have just 262 full-time-equivalent researchers per million people, against 1,585 in China and 4,821 in the U.S.

In developed economies, private industry funds 65–77% of national R&D—77% in China, 75% in the U.S. In India, the government still carries roughly 64% of the load, while private industry chips in barely the remaining 36%.

And the grants that exist are wildly lopsided: of the roughly ₹4,000 crore spread across some 40,000 extramural projects a year, the IITs alone gobble the lion’s share — over 80% of major competitive grants — while State universities, which enroll more than 85% of India’s students, fight over less than 10%.

NITI Aayog’s audit of public R&D institutions found that of India’s 1,815 public labs, more than half focus on agriculture alone, leaving manufacturing, materials, and digital technology chronically under-resourced. Over a third of these institutes are clustered in the south; the Northeast gets under 2%.

And our apex labs for electronics, petroleum, and chemicals were built near government capitals instead of industrial hubs like Pune, Jamnagar, or Dahej—cutting off exactly the kind of proximity that built Silicon Valley and Cambridge.

Then there’s the paperwork. NITI Aayog’s report on the Ease of Doing Research & Development in India (August 2026) lays it all out: the government procedures that delay grant releases by three to six months, and the traditional financial year-ending 31st March “use it or lose it” sweep that puts undue pressure on spending timelines.

Producing a doctorate and producing a good researcher are not the same thing, and Indian universities have gotten very good at the former while badly neglecting the latter. According to All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) records, Ph.D.

enrollment in India has grown by 70% in four years, from about 2.03 lakh in 2019-20 to 3.44 lakh in 2023-24 — by far the fastest-growing level of higher education, and a near-tripling since 2014-15. Yet the number of Ph.Ds actually awarded each year has not kept pace; instead, it has slipped from close to 38,986 degrees conferred in 2019-20 to around 32,588 in 2021-22, the most recent years for which comparable figures exist.

China awarded roughly 87,000 doctorates in 2023, about double that of India. Ph.D. graduations range from 10% of enrollments in State universities to 30% in premier centrally funded institutions. India is filling the doctoral pipeline far faster than it is clearing it—which means either scholars are taking longer to finish, or a growing share are discontinuing midway.

As experts put it, the real question facing India “is not whether to produce more PhDs, but whether those PhDs will matter.” The problem deepened when the University Grants Commission (UGC) made the Ph.D. a mandatory minimum qualification for college assistant professor recruitments and promotions under the API (Academic Performance Indicators) system.

Overnight, hundreds of under-resourced State and private universities launched doctoral programs without qualified guides or basic laboratory facilities. A lack of rigour in doctoral coursework and an informal supervisor-examiner nexus that rubber-stamps repetitive dissertations have diluted program quality.

Paradoxically, the UGC’s 2022 Ph.D. regulations, meant to implement NEP 2020, opened a “direct entry” route straight from a four-year undergraduate degree into a doctorate for students scoring 75%. Seasoned researchers warn this drops eighteen-year-olds with zero research training into Ph.D.

programmes designed for those with deep domain knowledge and a research-heavy master’s degree. Here is a silver lining: The IITs and premier private institutions such as BITS Pilani have re-engineered their Ph.D. programmes, enabling working professional scholars to address live industry problems as their thesis rather than shelf-bound theory.

The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has launched a ₹245 crore doctoral fellowship scheme explicitly built to fund Ph.Ds that translate into products and policy, competing with a dedicated...