Low funding for postdoc roles fuelling brain drain, govt. funds only 2,500 positions
India's research ecosystem is struggling with low funding and bureaucratic hurdles, leading to a 'brain drain' of scientific talent to the U.S. and other nations. Despite high optimism among researchers, the country's R&D expenditure remains significantly lower than global peers.
Why it matters
The systemic underfunding of research threatens India's long-term scientific and technological competitiveness.
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.
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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.
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