India’s R&D funding governance needs a reliable “map” of where public money goes. NITI Aayog highlights that funding information and allocation across central agencies are not transparent enough and are not well coordinated, making it difficult to verify who is funded, by whom, for what purpose, and whether funds are duplicated across agencies.

What happened

NITI Aayog’s assessment (supported by a companion survey) argues that R&D funding data in India lacks transparency and system-wide coordination. A key concern is concentration of funding under the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) in IITs despite the wider mandate to broaden support beyond the traditional research ecosystem. Another concern is that multiple central bodies may fund overlapping research themes, creating inefficiency in public expenditure.

The governance discussion also connects R&D funding transparency to the proposed Unified Project Management System (UPMS), which aims to streamline planning, funding, monitoring and evaluation across ministries and departments.

Background and earlier position: why UPMS alone is not enough

UPMS is positioned as an administration and workflow layer across ministries and departments. The main limitation emphasized is the “data problem”: the absence of persistent, machine-readable digital identifiers and standardized metadata for grants, researchers, institutions, and funders. Without these, even when individual agencies store information, automated systems cannot reliably match the same researcher or institution across different databases.

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