TThe Indian Researcher

India produces roughly forty thousand PhDs a year across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, according to the All India Survey on Higher Education. The country has the third or fourth largest scientific publication output globally, depending on the source. The Indian Institute of Science, the older IITs, the IISERs, TIFR, JNCASR, NCBS, IUCAA, NCRA, and a constellation of CSIR labs anchor world-class research in specific fields. The new Anusandhan National Research Foundation, established in 2023, is meant to be the structural funding upgrade Indian research has waited for since the 1990s.

Underneath all of this, the working Indian researcher is mostly alone. Not metaphorically. Operationally. The peer they need to talk to about their specific problem is, on average, two thousand kilometres away and outside their institutional reach.

¶The Isolation Problem In Detail

A computational biologist at an IISER in central India works on a problem that perhaps fifteen other researchers in the country are equipped to discuss seriously. Three of them are at IISc Bangalore. Two are at NCBS. Two more are at IITs. The rest are scattered. The official channels of contact, conferences, workshops, the occasional collaboration paper, produce contact roughly once a year. The unofficial channels, email, Twitter or X, the occasional WhatsApp group, produce intermittent contact at best. The closest functional peer for everyday thinking is often a postdoc the researcher trained with abroad, who is now at MIT or Max Planck.

This is the structural problem. Indian research is internationally connected in fragments and domestically connected in fragments, and the two fragmentations compound. The researcher's daily intellectual environment is, in practice, their own head and the two or three immediate colleagues at their institute.

The cost shows up where you would expect. Citation networks are thinner than they should be. Cross-institutional collaboration, despite years of policy intent, remains low as a share of total Indian research output. The retention of strong PhDs into Indian research careers, the question of whether the brightest scholars stay or go, turns substantially on whether they can imagine an intellectual community at home that is rich enough to do their best work in. Many cannot, so they go.

¶Why This Has Persisted

Three reasons, layered. The funding architecture has historically been institution-centric. Grants flow to PIs at specific institutions, encouraging concentration of effort inside the institution and discouraging cross-institutional collaboration except where deliberately incentivised. The DST, DBT, and CSIR systems have improved on this, schemes like SERB's CRG, the JC Bose fellowships, and the new ANRF programmes are explicitly more collaborative, but the default is still solo PI.

The communication infrastructure is weak. Most Indian universities and even many central institutions do not have functioning research seminar series that are open to researchers from other institutions. Travel budgets are tight. The pre-pandemic norm of in-person workshops has only partially shifted to a workable hybrid model. The simple act of two researchers in different cities having a recurring monthly conversation about their shared problem is, organisationally, harder than it should be.

The culture is hierarchical in ways that suppress lateral conversation. A young assistant professor will not casually email a senior professor at another institution to discuss an idea. The seniority structure of Indian academia, inherited from the colonial university system and reinforced by promotion mechanics, makes peer-to-peer cross-institutional conversation socially expensive.

¶What Community-Based Research Would Look Like

The shift, internationally, has been from individual-PI research toward what science studies scholars call community-based science: large, distributed, instrumented collaboration with shared infrastructure, shared data, shared protocols. Genomics, climate science, particle physics, increasingly machine learning, these have moved decisively in this direction. Indian researchers participate in international versions of these communities. They do not yet have functional Indian versions.

What would change with one. A working community of, say, two hundred computational structural biologists across all Indian institutions would have shared compute infrastructure, shared protocol repositories, a regular national seminar series with rotating institutional hosting, a postdoc and PhD exchange programme, and a peer-review pipeline that catches weak papers before they reach journals. Each individual researcher would do better work because they would be embedded in the live thinking of the field, not just its published artefacts.

This is not a fantasy. Smaller versions exist. The Indian Statistical Institute community has functioning cross-centre conversation. The astronomy community in India, IUCAA, IIA, NCRA, ARIES, RRI, has been deliberately networked for decades and shows the benefit. The mathematics community around TIFR, ICTS, CMI, and IMSc has dense conversation. These are exceptions. They prove the model works. They have not been generalised.

¶What Researchers Themselves Could Do

The bottom-up version does not need a policy change. Three concrete moves.

National seminar series, researcher-organised. Pick a sub-field. Identify the twenty most active labs across India. Set up a monthly online seminar with rotating speakers. Open attendance to anyone working in the area. The Indian Theoretical Computer Science seminar series is a template. Several biology and chemistry sub-fields have started similar things post-pandemic. More should.

Working groups around specific problems. Not standing committees. Time-bound, three-to-six-month groups of five to ten researchers across institutions, with a defined deliverable, a review paper, a benchmark dataset, a shared protocol document. These groups produce both the immediate output and the lasting network underneath it.

Postdoc and student exchanges. The Indian system makes this harder than it should be, but increasingly possible. Even a four-week visit by a PhD student from one institution to another can seed long-term collaboration. Senior researchers who facilitate this for their students are doing structural work for the field, not just for their own labs.

¶What Funders And Institutions Could Do

ANRF is the obvious opportunity. Its design explicitly anticipates collaborative funding and public-private participation. Its early signals matter. If it funds individual PIs as the primary model, it will reproduce the existing fragmentation. If it funds communities and infrastructure, shared facilities, distributed working groups, mobility programmes, it will change the field structurally.

Institutional leaders, directors, deans, vice-chancellors, control the working environment more than they often realise. The institution that builds a culture of cross-institutional seminars, open-door visiting researchers, and active mobility for its faculty will, within a decade, be a more attractive place to do research, and the cumulative effect on Indian science is real.

¶The Action

If you are an Indian researcher, the move is to spend two hours a week building your community. One outbound email to a peer at another institution. One seminar series joined or organised. One working-group conversation initiated. Compounded over a five-year horizon, this is the highest-leverage time investment you can make in your own research, separately from any single paper you write.

If you fund or run institutions, fund the connective tissue. The talent is here. The connective tissue is what makes the talent do its best work. That is what Indian research has been waiting for.