Catching the scientific debris

by Pralhad Burli and Ajay Shah.
Business Standard, 27 October 2025

Societies need to create `innovation systems' through which the raw talent of researchers is organised, funded and channeled. A valuable framework is the `Technology Readiness Level' ("TRL"). This concept (from NASA) categorises the maturity of a technology from its conception to its deployment. TRL 1 is the establishment of basic principles. TRL 2 is the formulation of a technology concept. TRL 3 is an experimental proof-of-concept. These early stages, TRL 1-3, constitute basic and early-stage applied research. The middle stages, TRL 4-6, involve validating components in a laboratory, then in a relevant environment, moving from a "breadboard" setup to a functional prototype. This is the core of applied R&D. The later stages, TRL 7-9, move on to the actual system being proven e.g. to a commercial product or deployed system.

This categorisation is not merely academic. Different TRLs require different kinds of organisations and funding mechanisms. For technologies at TRL 7 and above, the path to a market is clear. Private capital is available to fund this late-stage development and commercialisation. The risk is modest, the payoffs are understood and timelines are relatively short. The problem lies in the early stages. For TRL 1-6, private funding is scarce. This is the zone where government funding must step in.

For over 70 years, the US federal government was the single most important player in the world for TRL 1-6 research. It funded universities and national laboratories in the US that pushed the frontiers of knowledge at TRL 1-6. This created global public goods. From GPS to mRNA vaccines, an array of new technologies have come out of US government R&D expenditure. We in India today get $350 billion a year of services exports, owing to far sighted US government R&D spending that created the global public goods of CPUs, Unix and the Internet.

US federal funding in 2022 was over $45 billion for basic research and $48 billion for applied research (totally about Rs.8 lakh crore in a year). This engine is being systematically dismantled. The new Trump administration has initiated a series of actions that target TRL 1-6 funding, as part of their populist assault upon elite culture.

The proposed 2026 budget outlines cuts of 34 percent for basic research and 22 percent for all research. It demands a 55.7 percent cut to the National Science Foundation (NSF), from $8.8 billion to $3.9 billion, and a 39.3 percent cut to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), from $46 billion to $27.9 billion. These two agencies are the primary sources for TRL 1-2 basic research. The story for TRL 3-6 applied research is also rough. The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science faces a 14 percent cut, and NASA’s science research budget is slated for a 46.6 percent reduction, from $7.3 billion to $3.9 billion. Alongside this, more restrictive immigation in the US hampers the talent pipeline of researchers from all over the world.

This is not a simple budget trim. It is the disruption of the organisations that do the work. A research laboratory is not a tap that can be turned off and on. It is a complex organisation built on teams, specialised equipment, and accumulated, tacit knowledge. When funding is cut, when visas are blocked, these teams disperse. Graduate students, especially PhD candidates close to completion, leave science. Specialised facilities are mothballed and decay. Long-term research studies are cut short, invalidating years of research and resulting in the abrupt abandonment of valuable data. There is hysteresis: even if funding were fully restored after Trump, the knowledge and organisational capital are lost. It would take a decade or more to rebuild these capabilities. We are witnessing the rapid, deliberate destruction of the world's best innovation ecosystem.

Given the US government's outsized role in global basic and applied research, these cuts will adversely impact knowledge production worldwide. This TRL 1-6 funding gap cannot be easily filled. While the private sector is expected to increase investment in high-demand areas, such as clean energy for its own data centers, it will not compensate for the early TRL work that government funds. Private capital at TRL 7 exists to commercialise ideas that emerge from the TRL 1-6 innovation pipeline: but there will be fewer ideas available to commercialise. By cutting the root, the future growth of the tree is compromised. This will translate into lower productivity growth and lower global GDP growth for decades.

We have seen this movie before. In the 1920s, Germany was the undisputed global leader in science, particularly physics and chemistry. The Nazi government which took charge in 1933 was a populist one, harnessing mass anger against the cosmopolitan elites. An estimated 25 percent of all physicists in Germany, including 11 past or future Nobel laureates like Einstein, Born, and Szilard, fled Germany. The best research organisations of the world -- like the University of Gottingen -- were destroyed. It only took one year. In 1934, the great mathematician David Hilbert said to the Nazi education minister "Mathematics in Gottingen? There is really no such thing any more."

In that episode, the US emerged as the beacon of hope and numerous researchers were able to relocate to the US and restart the process of knowledge production. What rescue can be organised today?

Governments and philanthropists globally must recognise the emergency. They must step in to fill the funding gap for TRL 1-6 research. They must also be prepared to catch the debris: offering visas, jobs and funding for the persons leaving the US, regardless of nationality. For us in India, the agenda is:

  1. Build out ANRF to effectively fund R&D organisations in India, whether public or private.
  2. Allocating public resources for TRL 1-6 research
  3. Modifying visa rules to make immigration into India easy for research talent.

In 1989, when the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a similar opportunity for India to make a play for researchers from Eastern Europe. That opportunity was missed, as India was then weak and absorbed in crises. We should do better this time.

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