Scientific bodies face severe fund crunch
DEHRADUN: The development potential of Uttarakhand remains grossly unrealised with severe fund crunch facing all the four state-run scientific agencies that provide crucial scientific inputs for framing development policies for the hill state.
“All development strategies are formulated on the basis of the scientific data supplied by our four scientific agencies but they all are facing budgetary constraints.
As a result, the development potential of the mountain state remains unrealised,” said Ravinath Raman, secretary in-charge, the department of science & technology. “Efforts, however, are on to tide over the budget constraints by pooling in funds from various centrally funded schemes,” he added.
The department has been allocated an annual budget of Rs 4 crore this fiscal. It is, however, only a marginal increase over the annual budget of Rs 2.523 crore it was allocated last fiscal. A sizeable portion of that budget goes in paying employees’ salaries.
“A slight increase in the budget has come as a relief but the amount is still far below the department’s actual annual budgetary requirement of Rs 10-15 crore”, said the official.
“As a result, all four scientific agencies, which provide crucial scientific inputs for framing of development policies for different sectors are being run on shoestring budgets,” he said.
The state-run agencies Raman referred to are Uttarakhand State Council for Science and Technology (UCOST), Uttarakhand Space Application Centre (USAC), Uttarakhand Science Education and Research Centre (USERC) and the department of Biotechnology.
“The potential of these agencies to provide scientific inputs has been greatly circumscribed because we can’t equip them with state-of-the art technologies owing to the budget constraints,” Raman said.
“As a result, they are also not able to hire highly qualified scientific staff to improve their potential to deliver.”
Citing the example of USAC, he said the agency “receives satellite imageries but it is heavily dependent” on the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for their interpretation.