A free hand: on scientific institutes and GEM norms
Science must be unfettered if it is to be useful
Last week, the government issued a set of orders that scientists have heralded as ‘revolutionary’. A major change is in allowing scientific institutions to bypass the Government e-Marketplace (GEM), a Commerce Ministry initiative that is meant to prioritise made-in-India equipment. GEM norms require all government purchases — from laptops to furniture — to be routed through the GEM-portal, with a mandate to buy from the vendor offering the lowest price. While technocrats in government amplified this bypass as a “landmark” initiative to promote ‘ease of doing research and development,’ the fact is that until GEM-based procurement was made mandatory from 2020, the default option was to allow individual scientific institutions the freedom to make their choices regarding the vendors they procure. Take for example, sodium chloride. Something as common as table salt must be available in infinite supply and it is only proper that laboratories — they require great quantities for its myriad applications in research — source it from the supplier who offers it the cheapest. However, much like the avatars of salt — kosher, flat or sea — are uncommonly unique to the chef, the differences in purity even within common salt are critical to scientific research as well as the manufacture of pharmaceuticals. This translates to some vendors being more reliable and, therefore, more preferred.
A major aspect of scientific research is about being able to reproduce results of experiments described in publications. Often, this requires fidelity to the methods and materials of the original experimenter. Given the challenge of budgets, the inability to source the right material results in experiments being junked halfway, or crimping on experimental ambition, resulting, overall, in a net loss of resources, time and effort. If this is extended to materials more complicated than salt — precision lathes, customised lab-produced diamonds, biological molecules, for example — it is easy to understand the gripe of scientists. It is understandable, and pardonable, when a government experiments with an untested policy and runs into uncharted waters or unknown unknowns. In the case of GEM, it was a known fact that India lacked an industrial base for sophisticated machinery, and it was inevitable that the hammer-head policy that saw all products as cookie-cutter nails would impede scientific research. India’s scientific ministries are unique in that they are led by scientists, instead of the usual norm of having career bureaucrats. This was due to a recognition, dating back to the early years of the republic, that while science and technology can be employed to serve the state, science itself is unfettered and must be specially nurtured to be useful. A free hand is worth more than two fettered arms.