A recent report by NITI Aayog, about ‘Ease of Doing R&D in India’ revealed some uncomfortable truths about India’s R&D ecosystem. Together with a companion survey with inputs from more than 400 institutional leaders and 850 scientists, it reported that close to 80% of funding under the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) — the flagship research funding body — is concentrated in the IITs. This is despite ANRF’s mandate to support a wider base of universities and research bodies than the traditional funding model has managed.
There are also concerns that multiple Central agencies are possibly funding similar research areas, resulting in overlap and what the report calls “inefficient” use of public money.
These findings point to a common underlying gap: India does not have a system that can tell funders, researchers or the publics who is being funded, by whom, for what, and whether that funding has already been given elsewhere.
NITI Aayog’s response to this gap is the Unified Project Management System (UPMS) — a system to streamline the planning, funding, monitoring, and evaluation of public R&D projects across Ministries and Departments.
This proposed solution sounds good; however, it does not directly address an important problem.
PIDs and metadata
The technical term for what is missing is ‘PIDs and metadata infrastructure’. In plain language, it means every research grant in India will need a permanent, unique, machine-readable identifier called a persistent digital identifier (PID). This is like how a PAN number identifies a taxpayer or an IMEI number identifies a mobile phone.
Each PID should then be attached to a standard set of details called the metadata: which agency gave the money, to which institution, to which named researcher, what amount, over what period, and in which field. Finally, there is a linking system that will allow officials to track these details using the PID.
So every time a scientist publishes a paper and includes the PID in it, the system can track and evaluate the outcome of public funding. At least this is the idea.
Right now, a lot of this information exists within Indian funding agencies — but it is scattered across dozens of separate agency databases, in inconsistent formats, and often as free text rather than structured data. A researcher’s name might appear one way in a Department of Science and Technology (DST) record and slightly differently in a Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) database — and this difference can be enough for an automated system to not tell that they are the same person. An institution might be listed as “IISc, Bangalore” in one dataset and “Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru” in another, leading to a similar problem.
Multiply such inconsistencies across thousands of grants a year and you can see that the result is an information that does not provide a reliable picture of how research funding is being used.
Other countries’ solutions
This is not a new problem and India does not have to solve it from scratch. A global, non-profit infrastructure setup called the Grant Linking System already exists to do exactly this. It was built by the open digital infrastructure organisation Crossref. Its registry is called ‘Research Organisation Registry’ (ROR), built by a different organisation.
The system works through a small number of PIDs, each solving one piece of the puzzle. First, a funder ID identifies the funding agency in detail — the division, department, and even ministry if required. A similar ROR ID identifies the institution receiving the funding. Finally, an ‘ORCID’ identifier — familiar to Indian researchers today since most scientific journals today ask for it — identifies the individual researcher, so that funding data can be aggregated per person.
Since 2020, Crossref has also extended its system to include a grant DOI: a permanent identifier for the grant itself, which can be linked to whatever comes out of it — papers, patents, data.
Taken together, these four identifiers plus the metadata allow a funder or an independent analyst to ask questions that are nearly impossible to answer in India today. For example, how many different agencies have funded near-identical proposals? Which fields are receiving disproportionate investments relative to the national priorities? Does a small number of institutions or researchers account for a large share of the total funding?
This is why many research funders have adopted this system, with more than 2 lakh grants registered on it worldwide. The scale of the underlying problem this system solves is also well-documented. One 2013 analysis of U.S. funders used automated text-matching software to scan several lakh federal grant applications and estimated that duplicate or substantially overlapping funding may have cost the U.S. nearly $70 million. In a more recent analysis, in 2020, analysts checked nearly 20,000 competitive grants in Denmark and found that funds were getting concentrated among a small group of individual researchers and a narrow set of research topics.
This is similar to the pattern the NITI Aayog report flagged for Indian funding agencies — and painstakingly so.
Two ways forward
Policymakers considering how to act on NITI Aayog’s findings face two broad options.
One is to build an entirely new, India-specific system from the ground up — a sovereign national grant registry, developed and maintained independently. This has the appeal of full control: India will own the infrastructure outright and could tailor it precisely to its own agencies and federal structure, including State research schemes that a global system might not naturally prioritise.
The second option is to plug into the existing global non-profit infrastructure, requiring India’s funding agencies to become members of — and consistently deposit data with — the Crossref ecosystem that many research funders already use worldwide. This can be implemented faster since the technical standards and governance already exist, and are maintained by an international community rather than by a single Indian agency operating alone. It would also make India’s publicly funded research immediately visible and comparable within the same global dataset used to study research funding everywhere.
There is also a practical middle path: using the technical infrastructure of PID generators and funders’ own governance structure. Specifically, we can learn from systems that have worked elsewhere, such as the U.K. ‘Gateway to Research’ portal and the European Union’s Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS) and Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe (OpenAIRE). They run their own government-owned portals as the single point of entry for funding agencies, and the portals generate identifiers fully compatible with the global Crossref/ROR/ORCID standards.
This gives national governments political ownership and the ability to require all domestic agencies to comply — while also ensuring that the resulting data speaks the same language as the rest of the world’s research infrastructure.
For India, this hybrid model would mean a single national portal — one that the NITI Aayog has already proposed, called UPMS, and which Central and State funding agencies must use. The UPMS system can internally mint Crossref-compatible grant DOIs and link every record to ROR and ORCID identifiers. Then, it will be much easier to check for duplicate records, fund concentration, and so on.
Moumita Koley is a senior research analyst at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru.
Published – August 27, 2026 09:00 am IST
