A recent news report says that the government has asked ministries and departments to re-examine how guides for doctoral degrees are selected. According to it, the government intends for research to be largely confined to “topics that fit emerging needs and priorities of the country”, believing that PhD programmes should be “reoriented to promote innovation and development of new relevant ideas and technologies”.

That research of direct relevance to the country should be supported and promoted is inarguable. It is a good starting point to ask where public money is being spent — it should be in ways that can be explained to the public.

This also includes communicating the importance of research that has no foreseeable application. This is as true for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects as for non-STEM ones, Advertisement The obvious areas of immediate relevance to India include renewable energy, battery technology, sustainable agriculture, and health technologies. These areas tend to be well-supported anyway, though mainly through a variety of national missions spread across several ministries and government departments.

Standard government grant mechanisms can be enhanced easily if additional support must be directed to such areas. But direct approaches such as these can be subtly flawed. This is because they are targeted to the present and not to the future.

Thinking long-term, there’s a broader virtue in building the imagination and agility to respond to what might unfold in the future rather than to simply go with what we see most clearly now. In science, developments in applied areas typically lag basic research, sometimes by decades. This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics is a good example.

An experiment, done in the 1980s, that demonstrated that quantum mechanics could manifest at a scale much larger than that of single atoms, is of relevance to quantum computers, an application that wasn’t even referred to in the original papers. The success of Bell Laboratories, an American industrial lab that once held some of the most impactful patents globally (for example, the transistor, the laser, and optical fibre technology), was due, in large part, to a culture of basic research that was aided by considerable freedom to explore directions of no immediate relevance to the company.

Concentrating on identifying areas that seem obvious at present is superficially attractive. For one, progress can be easily quantified. But a more measured approach would recognise the value of indirect approaches, those that address core problems of supporting the larger enterprise of knowledge creation, whether in science and technology or more broadly.

Advertisement Here’s one such problem: Pick any government-funded student, one who receives a fellowship directly. Fellowships awarded by agencies such as the DST and the UGC are examples.

The likelihood is that they receive their scholarships only at intermittent intervals, often separated by months. A friend, awarded a prestigious government research fellowship at one of India’s most prominent public universities, has not been paid for the past nine months.

Her case is not atypical. Some years ago, an innovative idea was implemented, that of transferring fellowship amounts directly to the bank accounts of PhD students.

This eliminated a specific corrupt practice, whereby some institutions would siphon off a cut from the PhD scholar’s stipend before paying them. However, given the payment delays that exist in practice, institutions cannot support students in the interim because of the complexities of getting reimbursed.

A large number of university-funded PhD students in India, the non-NET students, receive a stipend of Rs 8,000 per month, which is below the minimum wage. This amount has remained unchanged since 2012.

To supplement this meagre income, students must take on temporary teaching appointments. This reduces the time and attention they can devote to research.

Here’s another problem: Industry-funded PhDs are few and far between. They are absent altogether outside a few IITs and similar institutions. This is for several reasons, among them a historical disconnect between industry and academia and the feeling that Indian academia cannot deliver on its promises in a timely manner.

There’s a case for training Indian PhDs to be able to better exploit the potential for such collaborations as well as to improve the ability of institutions and advisors to manage them. Finally, there are large parts of academic investigation that have little or nothing to do with industry or applications.

These include philosophy, sociology, history, political science, and so on. Unbiased enquiry in these areas of the humanities and social sciences is an essential part of what makes us human. But these are also areas where the question of “topics that fit emerging needs and priorities of the country” is subject to most political interference.

Devaluing research and training in non-STEM subjects will not help produce scientists and engineers who are in any way better placed to address India’s needs. In management theory, hygiene factors are components that, if absent or inadequate, lead to demotivation.

Their presence only ensures employees are not unhappy. Specific motivators supplement them, including a supportive work environment and the conviction that one’s work is important.

But there’s no greater demotivator than not being paid — or being paid very poorly — for one’s work. Ensuring the timely disbursement of salaries and fellowships that come from the government is a basic hygiene factor that Indian higher education needs to address. That this issue remains stubbornly unsolved signals deep problems with the way we treat the most vulnerable of our researchers.

To simply do better at what we’re doing now, as opposed to finding new and more glamorous things to do, is not often prioritised. If we don’t get these basics right, we will not get anything else right.

Menon is a professor at Ashoka University. Views are his own and do not represent those of his institution.