The long and winding R&D: While India tracks where publicly funded research money goes, it should track what it creates

Over ₹3,000 cr. That is a conservative estimate of what India's research-funding ecosystem could be losing annually to duplicate grants alone. A 2013 US analysis, 'Same work, twice the money?' of nearly 8,60,000 funded grants estimated that duplicate funding could account for up to 2.5% of research expenditure. Applied to India's 2020-21 gross expenditure on R&D (GERD), that amounts to roughly ₹3,175 cr (about $375 mn). But duplication is only one symptom of a deeper problem. India has no reliable way to see, in one place, what publicly funded research ultimately produces.

Every year, GoI invests thousands of crores in research through national funding agencies, such as SERB (Science and Engineering Research Board), DST (Department of Science and Technology), DBT (Department of Biotechnology), ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research), and ANRF (Anusandhan National Research Foundation). Yet, once a grant is awarded, there is no system that continuously tracks what it produces.

Instead, funding agencies rely largely on information reported by researchers at the end of a project. As a result, they cannot see when different grants are producing similar work, nor can they systematically recognise the full range of outputs a grant generates. What is easiest to report - typically journal publications - becomes the official record, while many other research outcomes remain fragmented or invisible.


The gap lies in how grants are managed. Every project concludes with a financial utilisation report showing how grant money was spent. It answers the question: where did the money go? It cannot answer the more important one: what did the money produce? The result is that funding agencies have no complete, searchable view of what public investment creates. They cannot easily identify overlapping work, understand how research portfolios are evolving, or assess the full return on public investment.

Also read | India’s WTO resistance risks slowing investment in developing nations

Around the world, research funders are replacing manual reporting with connected digital infrastructure. Instead of asking researchers, they require research outputs to be published or deposited in trusted data repositories. These outputs extend beyond journal articles to include datasets, software, policy briefs, patents, clinical trial registrations, trained researchers and other social-good products of publicly funded research. The result is a live, searchable record of what public funding produces.

This is made possible through persistent identifiers (PIDs). A PID is a permanent digital identifier, much like an Aadhaar number for research. Every grant receives its identifier, and researchers include it whenever they publish or deposit an output. Open technical infrastructure, such as that operated by global non-profit Crossref, automatically links every output back to the grant that funded it.

France requires researchers funded by French National Research Agency (ANR) to deposit their research outputs in the national repository, HAL, together with their grant reference, creating a searchable public record of taxpayer-funded research.

Wellcome Trust, one of the world's largest biomedical research funders, assigns every grant a PID through Crossref, allowing publications, datasets, reports and other outputs to be linked to the grant that funded them.

In Britain, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) brings this information together through its 'Gateway to Research' portal, where anyone can explore grants alongside the outputs they have produced.

For India, such an infrastructure could change how publicly funded research is managed. Research outputs become easier to discover, verify, cite and reuse, increasing the value of public investment. Researchers spend less time reporting, funding agencies spend less time collecting and verifying information, and the public gains greater visibility into taxpayer-funded research. More importantly, funders gain a complete and continuously updated picture of every grant and its impact. The missing piece is not recognising these broader outputs, but building the infrastructure that captures, connects and recognises them automatically.

India doesn't necessarily need to reinvent this infrastructure. On NITI Aayog's proposal, MeitY is rolling out the Unified Project Management System (UPMS), a common platform for managing research grants across DST, DBT, ICMR, ICAR, CSIR and ANRF. This is an important first step. But managing grants is not the same as understanding what they produce.

Built on PIDs, trusted repositories, and open, interoperable infrastructure, UPMS could underpin a National Research Output Dashboard. Similar to UKRI's Gateway to Research portal, it could provide a live, publicly searchable view of India's research investment, allowing anyone to explore outputs by grant, institution, discipline, researcher or funding programme as they are produced.

A June 2026 ANRF white paper, 'What is Impact? Generating Dividends of Economic Growth and Societal Benefits from Research and Innovation', recognises that publicly funded research extends well beyond journal articles to datasets, patents, trained researchers and policy impact. UPMS presents a timely opportunity to embed the infrastructure that makes those broader research outcomes visible, connected and discoverable, rather than leaving them scattered across disconnected systems.

India aims to raise R&D spending to 2% of GDP and become a global innovation leader. Achieving that will require more than larger budgets. It will require knowing, in real time, what public investment produces. India tracks where research money goes. It's time it tracked what that money creates.

Munshi is former adviser, Department of Biotechnology, science & technology ministry, GoI, and Chaube is assistant professor, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, Dehradun