New Delhi

India has cheered its research community by announcing increases in research funding as part of a generally austere budget.

In the financial year that begins on 1 April, the government plans to spend Rs147 billion (US$3.1 billion) on research and development (R&D) — an increase of about 9.5% — despite an economic slowdown that was exacerbated by the failure of the rains in last year's monsoon.

“The drought may have axed some projects in other ministries, but not in ours,” Valangiman Ramamurthi, secretary of science and technology, told Nature.

“The jump is not as big as last year's 25%,” says Ragunath Mashelkar, a chemical engineer who runs several of the ministry's applied research labs, “but it is adequate”.

The rise reflects the government's ambitious plan to expand India's total R&D spending from 1.1% of gross national product to 2% by 2007, says Ramamurthi. The funding hike comes despite the fact that the government has allotted only Rs60 billion in new money to all of its ministries this year.

Ramamurthi points to injections of an extra Rs2.15 billion for multidisciplinary research projects and Rs1.5 billion for drug research as examples of the government's priorities. The latter is being given priority, government officials say, so that India can develop its own drugs when the copying of foreign ones is outlawed by a new patent regime that is scheduled to come into force in 2005.

Biotechnology, information technology and renewable-energy research all rank highly in the budget, which also earmarks funds for a controversial plan to build a fast-breeder nuclear reactor near Chennai in Tamilnadu state.

“Overall, the budget is very good,” says Debi Sarkar, a biochemist at Delhi University. “I have much more money for my projects than when I started my career six years ago and I have no complaints.” But he adds that the main problem faced by Indian researchers “has never been with money, but with bureaucracy”.