Modi at 25: The hug Indian science is still waiting for

In 25 years, Narendra Modi has made Indians proud of their scientists. He has not yet made India a good place to be one

Of all the images from Narendra Modi’s 25 years in power, the one I keep returning to was taken on a bad day. It was the morning of 7 September 2019. Hours earlier, Chandrayaan-2’s Vikram lander had lost contact during its final descent, 2.1 km above the Moon. At the ISRO centre in Bengaluru, the Prime Minister pulled K Sivan, the space agency’s chief, into a long embrace while Sivan wept on his shoulder.

Most people saw a kind gesture. I saw the best thing Modi has ever done for Indian science. He has never done it again.

Why does a hug matter? Because most science fails. Most experiments don’t work. A researcher can spend three years on a question and come back with nothing, and that is normal, not a scandal. A country that wants its own medicines, its own chips and its own Nobel Prizes has to accept, and pay for, a lot of failure along the way. That morning, the Prime Minister showed he understood this. But the lesson stayed in the photograph. It never reached the rulebook.

That, in one line, is the story of science under Modi. He has not ignored science. If anything, he has given it more attention than any Prime Minister since Nehru. But he has treated it mainly as a show of national success, and a show is the one place where you cannot afford to fail.

Look at how his Government talks. A Quantum Mission. An AI Mission. A Semiconductor Mission. A Deep Ocean Mission. A mission has a target, a deadline and a big day when the result is unveiled. That approach has worked well when everyone knows the goal in advance: landing on the Moon, building UPI, making vaccines for the world. India should be proud of all three.

But real discovery doesn’t come with a known goal. Nobody can set a deadline for an idea that doesn’t exist yet. And when a Government’s image depends on success, the fear of failure trickles down. It shows up in the funding committee that rejects a bold proposal because it might not work, or in the young scientist who picks a safe topic to keep her job.

The money follows the same pattern. Last November, the Government launched a Rs 1 lakh crore fund for research and innovation. But it doesn’t give grants. It gives loans and buys stakes in companies, and expects the money back. That works for a startup turning a proven idea into a product. It does not work for the kind of research that has no buyer for decades. By July this year, only about 2 per cent of the fund had been approved.

And the industry still isn’t doing its share. In 2015, Modi asked Indian companies to spend more on research. Eleven years later, they spent about 0.3 per cent of GDP on it. The reason isn’t that business leaders missed the speech. In most Indian markets, companies win by being big and well-connected, not by inventing things. Until they face competition that forces them to innovate, no Government scheme will change that.

A second problem is more uncomfortable. When science becomes a show of national pride, it can be asked to prove things we already want to believe.

As Gujarat Chief Minister, Modi asked ISRO scientists to go looking for Lord Krishna’s Dwarka. In 2014, opening a hospital in Mumbai, he said Lord Ganesha’s elephant head showed that ancient India knew plastic surgery. Many laughed these off as slips. I think they come from the same place as the missions: the idea that science’s job is to make us proud.

It isn’t. Science’s job is to find out what is true, even when the answer is disappointing. India has real achievements to be proud of. Sushruta described nose surgery more than 2,000 years ago, and we know that because of evidence, not mythology. A healthy scientific culture is one where a young researcher can say “the evidence doesn’t support this story” and still keep her job.

One more sign of priorities. The Indian Science Congress, held almost every January since 1914 and usually opened by the Prime Minister, has not met since 2024. The Government stopped funding it over alleged financial irregularities, which the organisers deny. Whoever is right, the country’s oldest gathering of scientists stopped, and hardly anyone noticed. Rocket launches are national events. Scientists talking to each other, apparently, are not.

To be fair, a lot has been built. A new national research foundation, set up in 2023, finally gives scientists one main funder that judges proposals on merit. The science department’s budget has grown about five times. A generation of children now cheers for ISRO the way their parents cheered for the cricket team. That change in mood is Modi’s real achievement, and it will last.

Why should ordinary readers care? Because the best young minds still leave. Ask any family with a child doing a PhD: stipends arrive late, equipment takes months to buy, and the safest career advice is still “go abroad”. Every one of those students is a medicine, a company or a discovery that India pays to train and someone else gets to keep.

So the next 25 years need less spectacle and more patience. Three simple changes would do more than any new mission:

• Make it safe to fail. Fund good projects even when they don’t work out, and say so publicly. If nothing that fails gets a second chance, scientists will only attempt the safe and the small.
• Pay on time. Measure the days it takes for an approved grant to reach a lab, and how old scientists are when they get their first grant of their own. Those two numbers matter more than any launch.
• Let the evidence speak. Fund research into India’s past generously, and accept whatever it finds.

Twenty-five years from now, the real sign that Indian science has grown up won’t be a photo from a control room. It will be something nobody films: a 29-year-old researcher at a small state university, whose three-year experiment found nothing, opening an email to learn her grant has been renewed anyway.

Modi once hugged one scientist on a bad day. The system he leads still hasn’t learned to do the same for the rest.

The author is a physicist at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and contributing opinion writer at the Wall Street Journal; Views presented are personal.