India Accounts for Only 3.5 Pct of Global Research

Bangalore: India has come a long way in various fields of science and technology but shockingly only 3.5 percent of global research output in 2010 was from India, says a study. India's share in global research output was much below the overall average count in most disciplines, reports Kounteya Sinha for TNN.

India's share of world output in mathematics was 2 percent in 2010 while China stood at 17 percent. In case of materials sciences, India's share was at 6.4 percent in 2010 and China's was at 26 percent.

India's share of world research output in psychiatry, neurosciences, immunology, molecular biology, environmental research and clinical medicine was 0.5, 1.4, 1.8, 2.1, 3.5 and 1.9 percent respectively, says the study on India's research output and collaboration conducted by Thomson Reuters.

India is considered as the next big place for computer sciences. But the research show numbers that are terribly low. Just 2.4 percent of global research on computer sciences was noted to be from India in 2010 while the world share was high in China (15 percent), Korea (6.3 percent) and Taiwan (5.7 percent).

As per the report "India has a long and distinguished history as a country of knowledge, learning and innovation. In the recent past, however, it has failed to realize its undoubted potential as a home for world class research."

However, in 2010, India's largest shares of world research output were in chemistry (6.5 percent), materials science (6.4 percent), agricultural sciences (6.2 percent), pharmacology and toxicology (6.1 percent), microbiology (4.9 percent), physics (4.6 percent) and engineering (4.2 percent).