BANGALORE — A high-powered panel set up at the request of India’s Ministry of Finance is reviewing the work of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the country’s primary funding and coordinating body for biomedical research, based in New Delhi.
The ICMR has faced criticism that the medical research it supports does not adequately address public health problems. Such critiques, it seems, have prompted the ministry to seek an external audit of the ICMR’s research programs before the government releases the 85 billion rupees ($1.6 billion) that the council has asked for over the next five years—twice as much as it got for the previous five years—including 31.5 billion rupees for new scientific institutes and an upgrade of existing ones.
Prakash Tandon, a neurosurgeon at the government-funded National Brain Research Centre in New Delhi who heads the 11 member committee, told Nature Medicine that a new direction for medical research will be formulated after critical evaluation of the usefulness and public health relevance of programs in each of the ICMR’s 27 institutes. It’s likely that a number of duplicated programs across different ICMR institutes will be recommended for closure, added pathologist Indira Nath, an emeritus professor at the National Institute of Pathology in New Delhi and a committee member. The review of the ICMR began two weeks ago and a report will be submitted within the next two months, according to Tandon.