"India's R&D funding architecture suffers from fragmentation rather than scarcity." Critically examine in light of NITI Aayog's "Ease of Doing R&D" findings.

NITI Aayog's "Ease of Doing Research & Development in India" reports (April 2026), drawn from 400+ institutional leaders and 850+ scientists, expose a research ecosystem where money is dispersed and poorly tracked [1]. The statement is largely valid on delivery, but scarcity remains a real, parallel constraint.

Evidence supporting the fragmentation thesis

• Data silos: funding records sit across dozens of agency databases (DST, DBT, CSIR, ANRF) in unstructured free-text form, so no unified map of who is funded, by whom, for what exists [1].
• Duplication: multiple Central agencies fund overlapping research areas, causing inefficient use of public money [1].
• Institutional concentration: about 80% of ANRF funding flows to IITs, contradicting its statutory mandate to widen support to universities and colleges [1][2].
• Legal consolidation without behavioural change: the ANRF Act, 2023 subsumed SERB (2008) into a single statutory funder, yet disbursement still mirrors the older elite-institution pattern [2].

Where the thesis is incomplete — scarcity is not a myth

• India's GERD is only 0.6–0.7% of GDP, far below China, the USA and South Korea — an absolute resource gap no reallocation alone can close [1].
• Of ANRF's ₹50,000 crore target (2023–28), only ₹14,000 crore is budgetary; the remaining ~72% depends on PSUs, private, philanthropic and international contributions, making delivery uncertain [3].
• Weak industry-academia linkages and regulatory bottlenecks compound both problems [1].

Way forward

• A unified, machine-readable national R&D funding database enabling cross-agency duplication checks.
• Operationalise the proposed hub-and-spoke model, linking 150–200 universities to an IIT/IISER/national laboratory [1].
• Raise GERD alongside governance reform.

Fragmentation and scarcity are therefore complementary, not competing, diagnoses: India spends too little and spends it too opaquely. Fixing transparency multiplies the value of every rupee, while a steady rise in GERD gives that transparency something worth mapping — together advancing the NEP's vision of a broad-based, self-reliant knowledge economy.