One factor that Mathai Joseph and Andrew Robinson do not consider in their discussion on Indian science is the disastrous effect of uncoupling education and research in the country's universities (see Nature 508, 36–38; 2014).

Several research institutes were created throughout India after it gained independence. These took away good students from the universities and made funding harder to come by, causing a decline in research. In turn, this diminished the number of science faculty members in universities and marred the spirit of education.

This is the opposite result to that predicted by the celebrated Indian spectroscopist Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman. He declared in the 1950s that the institutes would become “mausoleums of science”. He strongly believed that the best research could only be done by the universities (see P. Balaram Curr. Sci. 75, 977; 1998).