Unified portal for R&D monitoring, funding in works

The Centre is set to revamp the funding and monitoring framework for R&D projects funded across all government departments to develop a national R&D database and target national research goals more effectively, ET has learnt.

High-level inter-ministerial discussions, steered by Niti Aayog, have already been held with secretaries to more than a dozen ministries/departments to develop the 'Unified Architecture for Project Lifecycle Management'.

This will essentially operate like a national dashboard for reporting, monitoring as well as outcome analysis of government-funded R&D projects, across all scientific and academic departments and laboratories under various ministries, a key missing piece in the current R&D ecosystem.


The unified platform aims to improve the researcher's interface in keeping with the national goal of bringing 'Ease of Doing Research'.

A Europass CV- like template, to enable researchers to apply for R&D funding in a simple online format, is envisaged as part of the plan.

A key trigger for the move is the Centre's difficulty in identifying the right researcher and institute when considering funding of critical R&D projects. The current scenario offers no clear database to make an informed decision on instituting a particular R&D project.

UNIFYING INDIA'S R&D DATA

It is gathered that a unified dashboard is currently under development and undergoing testing to enable all departments to use it seamlessly. A technical committee has also been set up to fast track the onboarding of the system, ET has learnt.

All ministries/agencies will input the R&D project related data to the unified platform which will have four pillars -- project proposal submission, approval and funding tracking, project execution monitoring and outcome and impact assessment.

These four will encompass all key R&D aspects -- from facilitating project proposal submission by the researcher across any department and agency through the unified dashboard to allowing both a departmental as well as a national insight into the overall sum of R&D impact and implications.

It is expected that better coordination between different arms of the government on R&D will follow leading to efficient data management, resource optimisation and decision making.

The 'unified architecture' will also reflect government-funded R&D projects across private/ NGO sectors to enable data capture of ongoing research areas and expertise across segments.

ISOLATED R&D ECOSYSTEM

After several meetings with funding organisations and ministries, coordinated by the Niti Aayog, huge fragmentation, rigidity and absence of reporting/monitoring mechanisms, were identified as key problems ailing the country's R&D ecosystem.

While several ministries do have their own portals to map R&D flow, most of these are quite old and work in isolation which leaves little scope for data integration or aggregation to even generate an institution wise /state wise or agency wise report on the status of R&D funding.

It is difficult to often even trace the details of researchers involved, publication and so on leaving several gaps in the database.