ABSTRACT
Introduction Science, technology and innovation have come to occupy the centre-stage of debates on economic policy making in a major way. The last few decades have observed many drastic policy changes, both by national governments and at the international level, to promote scientific research and technology development. The implementation of trade related intellectual property rights (TRIPS), providing the ambit of patent to public funded university research, and promoting scientific collaboration between countries beyond Europe and North American countries are a few of them. Among the countries in the global South, India has declared the decade 2010-20 as the ‘decade of innovation’. It has raised its gross expenditure on research and development, in absolute terms, fourfold to around 8698 million euros in the last ten years, and has become a partner in EU’s FP7 programme on scientific collaboration (Krishna 2013). The Department of Science and Technology, the apex decision-making body in science and technology in India has signed agreements for scientific collaborations with 40 countries in the last few years (Bhattacharya 2014). These policies have also presented complex and nuanced questions for development scholars and policy makers for the future of public funded research, technological catch-up and learning.
