India is planning a series of measures to achieve its potential in science. This was announced by a senior official of India’s Department of Science and Technology at a press briefing last month.

2002/03 figures have revealed that India is lagging behind China in terms of investment in science and in number of scientific publications. In the reference period, India’s investment in science reached 3.7 billion USD compared to China’s 15.5 billion (the US and Japan invested respectively 124 billion USD and 277 billion USD), and whilst Indian scientists had 19 500 papers published in journals listed by the Science Citation Index, Chinese scientists had 50 000.

In order to improve India’s global Science Citation Index ranking from 14^th to 7th, the government has planned the following interventions:

• Increase investment in science in order to reach the total sum of 21.5 billion USD by 2011;
• Attract talented school students to careers in science;
• Provide the top 500 students with guaranteed funding from the age of 17 through to the age of 32;
• Organise summer camps in science attended by Nobel laureates and famous Indian scientists for the top one per cent of school leavers.

(Source: Science and Development Network)