[20th August 2026] The Hindu OpED: The IISERs have a leadership problem

Mentor Comment

Several of the seven Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research are operating under temporary, divided or incomplete leadership, with chairpersons holding simultaneous charge of two or three other institutions and nominated positions for eminent scientists lying vacant. The institutions were created to give students an intellectually vibrant research environment and prize autonomy as an essential ingredient of good science, which sits against a statutory Board structure dominated by government officials and nominees.

What are the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research?

1. Why they were created: The Indian government created the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs) to offer students an intellectually vibrant research environment and to bring them into research at a relatively early stage by the standards of the Indian system.
2. What they prize: They treat autonomy as an essential ingredient of good science, specifically the ability of scientists to decide which questions are worth pursuing and with what resources, and top down control is inimical to that vision.
3. Their statutory basis: They were brought within the framework of the National Institutes of Technology, Science Education and Research Act, 2007.
4. How many there are: Seven IISERs are in operation, each with its own Board of Governors.

How are IISER Boards of Governors constituted?

1. The statutory requirement: The 2007 Act requires each IISER to have a Board of Governors that includes senior government officials and other government nominees.
2. Named ex officio positions: The IISER statutes specify, among others, the secretary of higher education and the director of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.
3. The accountability rationale: Publicly funded science should be publicly accountable, which is the justification for the government presence on the Boards.
4. Where the rationale runs out: Suboptimal appointments or outright vacancies are objectionable because they lead to policy paralysis at best, which is a failure of accountability rather than an exercise of it.

What does the current composition of the seven Boards show?

1. The IISc director’s spread: The director of the Indian Institute of Science is an ex officio member of most IISERs.
2. IISER Pune: The chair of its Board is also the chairperson of the Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur.
3. IISER Berhampur: Its Board chair was given additional charge while also chairing the Board of the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Guwahati. Nominated positions on the same Board lie vacant, including one for an Indian Institute of Technology director and two for eminent scientists.
4. IISER Bhopal: Its current director is listed as director in charge, after the previous director left to join NITI Aayog in June.
5. IISER Thiruvananthapuram: Its chairperson simultaneously chairs the Boards of the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Kottayam and the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Design and Manufacturing, Kurnool.
6. The cumulative position: Interim appointments are routine and vacancies arise during transitions, and ex officio positions change when officials move between posts, but taken together several IISERs are operating under temporary or incomplete leadership.

Who is leading India’s basic science institutions?

1. IISER Pune’s chairperson: A retired Indian Administrative Service officer whose educational background is in commerce and journalism.
2. IISER Pune’s director: A chemical engineer by training, whereas the IISERs have little focus on engineering.
3. IISER Thiruvananthapuram’s chairperson: A surgeon.
4. IISER Tirupati’s chairperson: A chemical engineer and the co founder of an industrial group.
5. IISER Berhampur’s chairperson: An executive in the footwear industry.
6. The measurable outcome: Going by awards, fellowships or global achievement and recognition, there are few outstanding scientists in positions of authority on the IISER Boards today.

Why does the professional background of a chairperson matter for a basic science institution?

1. There is no legal bar: No rule requires that the chairperson of a scientific institution must be a scientist.
2. Why it matters regardless: It bears on each institution’s credibility and on its vision, both of which rest on who is seen to be setting the research direction.
3. What the Boards do gain from outsiders: Expertise in administration, industry, finance and public policy is genuinely useful to a Board.
4. What the case for scientists rests on: Institutions focused on basic science should draw their leadership from the scientific community, where many people combine distinguished research careers with substantial experience in running academic and research organisations.
5. The practice that was dropped: The government had earlier appointed the finest scientists to the IISERs’ helm before discontinuing the practice.
6. The question that actually arises: It is not whether the current leaders are competent, it is why India’s many accomplished scientists are not being asked to lead institutions whose central purpose is basic science.

How does divided and interim leadership weaken institutional autonomy?

1. Attention divided across institutions: Leaders whose attention is already split between two or three institutions cannot supply sustained direction to any one of them.
2. Control shifting away from scientists: With outsiders and divided attention at the top, scientists have less control over decisions that affect their own work.
3. Rotation instead of recruitment: The availability of a research cadre calls into question the practice of moving the same people between institutions rather than recruiting from the scientific community.
4. Administration falling behind: People familiar with the IISERs’ functioning describe an administration losing its ability to keep up with students’ needs in respect of a good education in basic science.
5. The internal assessment: A senior scientist at one of the IISERs described the position as one in which there is no vision or imagination and no sense of leadership propelling the institution towards its core goals of carrying out high quality frontier research in and teaching basic science at an international level.
6. The powers that go unused: By design, the directors and the Board hold the power to institute positive changes, so the deficit is one of direction rather than of authority.

Challenges to institutional autonomy in India’s basic science institutions

1. Lagging decline masked by reputation: An institution whose governance has begun to decline can remain scientifically productive for years as long as the people who built its reputation remain and the institutional label is still valuable, which delays any corrective response. e.g. the IISERs continue to attract strong entrants through the joint admission route while several Boards run without full leadership.
2. Concentration of authority: Weak collegial governance shifts decisions towards a small group at the top, reducing faculty participation in academic direction. e.g. the flagging of a risk of concentration of authority as a consequence of the IISERs’ present leadership arrangements.
3. Risk averse research culture: Where leadership lacks a research background, funding and hiring decisions favour safe incremental work over frontier problems. e.g. the expectation of an increasingly risk averse institutional culture as the cumulative effect of the IISERs’ governance decline.
4. Vacancies in nominated positions: Seats reserved for eminent scientists and institute directors go unfilled, removing the very expertise the statute intended the Board to carry. e.g. the IISER Berhampur Board, with one Indian Institute of Technology director position and two eminent scientist positions vacant.
5. Interim leadership without a mandate: A director in charge cannot commit an institution to long horizon research investments. e.g. IISER Bhopal, run by a director in charge after the previous director left for NITI Aayog in June.
6. Government nominee dominance: The statutory requirement of senior officials and nominees on the Board makes institutional direction dependent on the postings cycle of the civil service. e.g. the ex officio membership of the secretary of higher education on IISER Boards under the 2007 Act statutes.
7. Underfunding of basic research: India’s gross expenditure on research and development remains below one per cent of gross domestic product, so institutional autonomy is further constrained by dependence on annual government grants. e.g. the persistent share of roughly 0.64 per cent of gross domestic product against the two per cent and above spent by comparable research economies.
8. Faculty attrition to better resourced systems: Weak governance and uncertain research support push early career scientists towards positions abroad or in the private sector. e.g. the reliance of schemes such as Ramanujan and Ramalingaswami fellowships on reversing exactly this outflow.

Conclusion

The IISERs were created on the premise that scientists deciding their own research questions produces better science than top down direction, and the statutory Board structure was the accountability counterweight to that autonomy. The counterweight has become the whole of it, with chairpersons drawn from outside the scientific community, ex officio members spread across several institutions, and seats reserved for eminent scientists left vacant. Restoring the earlier practice of appointing distinguished scientists to the helm, and filling the nominated positions the statutes already provide, requires no change in the law.

Basic Scientific Research in India

1. What it covers: Basic research is investigation directed at understanding fundamental phenomena without a specified application, distinguished from applied research and from experimental development.
2. Institutional spread: It is conducted through the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research laboratories, the Department of Atomic Energy and Department of Space institutions, the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, the Indian Institute of Science, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the central universities.
3. Scale of national spending: India’s gross expenditure on research and development stands at roughly 0.64 per cent of gross domestic product, against about two per cent or more in most comparable research economies.
4. Composition of that spending: The government accounts for the larger share of research spending in India, whereas in most leading research economies the private sector accounts for the bulk of it.
5. Global standing on output: India ranks among the top three countries in the world by annual volume of scientific publications, and its citation impact remains below that publication rank.
6. The IISER model: The IISERs were designed as a distinct category from the Indian Institutes of Technology, combining a five year integrated science programme with a research faculty, so that undergraduates enter laboratories early.
7. The funding reform: The Anusandhan National Research Foundation, established under the Anusandhan National Research Foundation Act, 2023, is intended to fund research across universities and colleges, with a substantial share of its corpus expected from non government sources.

Government Initiatives for Science Education and Research

1. Anusandhan National Research Foundation: Established under the Anusandhan National Research Foundation Act, 2023 as the apex body for seeding, growing and promoting research across the natural sciences, engineering, mathematics, environmental and earth sciences, health and agriculture, with a mandate to fund university and college research.
2. INSPIRE: The Innovation in Science Pursuit for Inspired Research programme of the Department of Science and Technology offers scholarships to school students, undergraduate and postgraduate scholarships in the basic and natural sciences, and faculty fellowships.
3. Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana: A fellowship programme to identify and support students with an aptitude for research careers in the basic sciences, since merged into the INSPIRE stream.
4. Ramanujan and Ramalingaswami Re entry Fellowships: Offered by the Science and Engineering Research Board and the Department of Biotechnology respectively to bring Indian scientists working abroad back into Indian institutions.
5. PM Research Fellowship: Provides doctoral fellowships at institutions of national importance with an enhanced stipend and a research grant, to retain top undergraduates within the domestic research system.
6. National Research Professorship and J.C. Bose Fellowship: Recognise and support distinguished scientists to continue active research beyond conventional retirement.
7. Vigyan Jyoti and Women in Science and Engineering KIRAN: Target the participation of girls and women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics education and research careers.

Key Facts about the IISERs

1. Number and locations: Seven institutes, at Kolkata, Pune, Mohali, Bhopal, Thiruvananthapuram, Tirupati and Berhampur.
2. Year of first establishment: The first two, at Kolkata and Pune, were established in 2006, followed by Mohali in 2007, Bhopal and Thiruvananthapuram in 2008, Tirupati in 2015 and Berhampur in 2016.
3. Statutory status: They are Institutes of National Importance under the National Institutes of Technology, Science Education and Research Act, 2007.
4. Administering ministry: The Department of Higher Education in the Ministry of Education.
5. Flagship programme: A five year BS-MS dual degree in the basic sciences, with admission through the IISER Aptitude Test and other channels.
6. Governance structure: A Board of Governors chaired by a chairperson, with a director as the chief executive, and a Senate for academic matters.
7. Named ex officio Board members: The secretary of higher education and the director of the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, among others.

Back2Basics: National Institutes of Technology, Science Education and Research Act, 2007

1. What it is: A central Act that declares certain institutions to be Institutes of National Importance and provides for their incorporation, governance and funding.
2. Enacted: 2007, originally covering the National Institutes of Technology, and later extended to the IISERs and to the Indian Institutes of Engineering Science and Technology.
3. What Institute of National Importance status confers: Autonomy to award its own degrees, direct central funding, and exclusion from the University Grants Commission’s affiliation framework.
4. Governance it prescribes: Each institute has a Board of Governors as the principal executive body, a Senate for academic decisions, a chairperson, a director and a registrar.
5. Composition requirement: The Board must include senior government officials and other government nominees, which is the provision that places the secretary of higher education and the Indian Institute of Science director on IISER Boards through the institute statutes.
6. The Council: The Act also creates a Council for the institutes it covers, chaired by the Union Minister in charge, to coordinate across them.
7. Why it governs this item: It is the statutory source of both the IISERs’ autonomy and the government dominated Board structure that the present appointments have made the operative feature.

Way Forward

1. Restore scientist leadership at the helm: Reviving the earlier practice of appointing distinguished scientists as chairpersons and directors requires no amendment to the 2007 Act, only a change in the selection practice.
2. Fill the vacant nominated seats: Appointing to the eminent scientist and institute director positions already provided in the statutes restores the scientific expertise the Board structure was designed to carry.
3. Bar simultaneous multiple chairmanships: A rule against holding the chair of more than one Institute of National Importance would end the divided attention that leaves several IISERs without sustained direction.
4. Time bound filling of directorships: A fixed outer limit on how long an institute may run under a director in charge would prevent interim leadership becoming the standing arrangement.
5. Publish selection criteria and search process: A transparent search committee process, with published criteria for research standing and institution building experience, would make appointments contestable on merit.
6. Build a leadership pipeline from the research cadre: Structured administrative training for mid career scientists would widen the pool beyond the same individuals rotated between institutions.
7. Strengthen Senate authority over academic direction: Vesting curriculum, faculty recruitment and research priorities firmly with the Senate would insulate scientific decisions from Board level turnover.
8. Raise and stabilise research funding: Multi year block grants through the Anusandhan National Research Foundation would reduce the dependence on annual allocations that constrains long horizon research.