Reshmi Mukherjee 
Now the question is whether a pay-hike or freedom to start a private company will increase patenting and quality of research in India? For all you know, it may not. While this certainly is a trigger to encourage scientists to contribute more and contribute effectively, we need to inspect some other factors in Indian science that hinder quality work.
Information lag
Scientists should have easy access to information on basic and industry-driven research which keeps them abreast of the latest happenings. Scientists need to have access to knowledge databases from their institute. How? There are several online knowledge database sources like Scifinder Scholar, IEEE xplore, Science Direct, which every scientist should be given access to. During my Ph.D days in a premier institute in India, we had to make umpteen visits to the library and search for journals, get photocopies and repeat the process for any interesting reference. I believe most Indian scientists still do the same, except for those in high-end institutes. But, to increase the number of patents and quality of research, we cannot depend only on a handful of good institutes. We need to provide these basic facilities to every scientist. With knowledge database now available online, access to such sources will save enormous amount of time. Furthermore, I have also seen two institutes located within a few hundred of meters of one another subscribing to the same expensive journals. Can't two nearby institutes come together to share journals and save money for the expensive knowledge-database, which again they could share?
The reagents saga
We buy things from foreign countries paying 40 to 90 times more, depending upon which country we are buying our scientific commodities from. As a student in India, I remember buying a simple plastic clip, which joins two parts in a set up, paying 40 times more from the US. I used to wonder if we can't make this simple plastic clip at home. We bought fine laboratory chemicals, also paying 40 times more, and waited for three months before they reached us. I cited an example from chemistry but I know similar problems exist in other disciplines too. Every scientist in our country, particularly from reputed institutes, experiences this irony on a day to day basis – couldn't I have paid a lot less money and got rid of the waiting time? I hope, someday India will have chemical companies like Aldrich and Fluka, so that scientists get things cheaper and have more time to innovate.
Patent illiteracy
Considering we have access to knowledge-database, is it enough to produce good quality, patentable research? Our scientists should appreciate patents and give them more honour, just as they appreciate the value of publishing in peer-reviewed journals. When I visited one of India's premier institutes (my alma mater ) after filing three patents on design and synthesis of molecules for HIV and cancer inhibition, the faculty was keener on knowing how many peer-reviewed articles I had to my name rather than the patents. Unfortunately, patents bar scientists from publishing immediately. So, I didn't have any publications to my name at the time and tried to explain this to them. But the point was not driven home, as I could sense. Unless patents and papers weigh equally on the laboratory beam balance, Indian scientists will perhaps not be encouraged enough to file a patent.
Also, scientists should learn to acknowledge collaborations in a patent. There is a problem here too. Scientists generally tend to show their enormous capabilities by doing everything alone and also love to see what someone has done alone. However, times have changed and it is globally acknowledged that collaborative research pays more dividends. Our scientists will have to be honest in choosing their co-authors depending on their contribution, even for a patentable work.
