A few days of ago (9 Jan 2012) Sagarica Gosh of IBN CNN had a segment on the output of Scientific man power in India. Nobelist Amartya Sen participated, and gave his perspective on the State of Science teaching & research in India. He was stressing the need for Equity and Excellence. For me more than anything else, Equity is the most important factor in a poor country like India (where I was born and raised till age 28).
For comparison, there are about 155,000 people engaged in R&D (both academia and industry) in India, while in China the comparable figure is 1,440,000 and in the US it's about 1,500,000. Roughly, China has 4.8X fewer people than the US; India has 7.75X fewer people than in China. On this basis, you may say that the US represents the First World, China represents the Second World (Ex-Communists & their satellites) and India represents the Third World.
The US spends about 2.45% of her GDP on R&D, while China spends about 1.7% of her GDP and India spends about 1.2% of her GDP on R&D.
Dr. Manmohan Singh wants to increase the R&D expenditure to 2% of the GDP in the coming years.
My anxiety is how much MORE they want to spend at the Bottom of the Pyramid? About 26% of the total population (312 million Indians) is totally illiterate, and the figure is nearly 50% if you take women alone. This means they just can't read or write in any language, and can't do simple addition and deduction of math.
This bothers me the most....
More later.
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