Orissa: India has to increase public private partnerships and catalyze significantly increased interaction between publicly owned Science and Technology institutions and industry, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said.

Speaking at the the 99th Annual Session of the Indian Science Congress, in Bhubaneshwar today, Singh expressed that at present, publicly funded R&D is skewed in favour of fundamental rather than applied research. It is easier to attract industrial funds into applied research areas and a set of principles should be formulated to push such funding and to drive Public-Private-Partnerships in Research and Development.

It is in some ways ironic that General Electric and Motorola have created world-class technology hubs in India, while our own industry has not done so, except perhaps in the pharmaceutical sector. We need therefore, to look at ways of incentivising private Research and Development investment under Indian conditions.

Over the last few years, the number of scientific publications by Indian scientists working in India, has increased at more than 12% per annum against the global average of 4%. India has moved from the 15th rank in 2003 to the 9th rank in 2010 with respect to the number of publications in peer-valued journals.

The INSPIRE scheme is doing well and is also responding to our concerns about inclusiveness. The enrolment of weaker sections in the scheme is good and 49.6% of the INSPIRE awardees are women. More than 60% of INSPIRE fellows pursuing doctoral research happen to be women.

Over the past few decades, India's relative position in the world of science had been declining and we have been overtaken by countries like China. Things are changing but we cannot be satisfied with what has been achieved. We need to do much more to change the face of Indian science. We must strengthen the supply chain of the science sector. While it is true that science and engineering continue to attract some of our best students, many of them later opt for other careers because of relatively poorer prospects in science.

We must also make scientific output more relevant to our stage of development. It is said that science is often pre-occupied with problems of the rich, ignoring the enormous and in many ways more challenging problems of the poor and the under-privileged.

While research generates new knowledge, we need innovation to use this knowledge creatively and productively for social benefit. Our Government has declared 2010-20 as the "Decade of Innovations". We need to give practical meaning to innovation so that it does not end up being just a buzz word.

We are examining a proposal to build national capacity and capability in supercomputing which will be implemented by the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore at an estimated cost of Rs. 5000 crore, informed the Prime Minister.