From endless frontier to new golden age: Lessons for Indian science

India needs to invest in metascience — in institutions, expertise, and people whose job is to study how Indian science actually works, an opinion piece published on Tuesday has argued.

The piece points to the recent 125-page policy document released by the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) titled ‘Science: A New Golden Age’, which positions itself as a sequel to Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report ‘Science: The Endless Frontier’ that laid the foundations of the post-war American research system.

The report, the author Moumita Koley notes, could be consequential for India by revealing the importance of something India currently lacks: the ability to study its own science system with evidence.

This means documenting what has worked and what has not, instead of forgetting it with every change in leadership, and making institutions that fund science accountable for evidence that what they fund and why are actually working.