India’s draft National Health Research Policy, which was released for public comment in July, has notable strengths.

First, the policy draft directly confronts administrative barriers, many of which lie within the department of health research’s authority to address. Per the new policy, funding agencies would be required to publish turnaround times from application to project closure. Unspent funds could be carried across financial years. A single ethics review would be permitted for multi-site studies so that the same protocol need not be approved multiple times.

Even if the policy achieved only these reforms and nothing else, it would represent substantial progress over the current situation.

Second, the draft proposes a fundamental rethink of how research should be evaluated. The proposed Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) Impact of Research and Innovation Scale extends assessment beyond publications and citations to include clinical translation, policy influence, indigenous technology, mentorship and community benefit. The current heavy emphasis on publication counts has tended to favour smaller, often descriptive studies over research with greater translational potential.

Third, the draft proposes treating public-funded research infrastructure as national assets accessible to researchers beyond the institutions that house them. This welcome step has been a major driver of research in other settings, but how this will be implemented in India remains to be seen. Organisations such as the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) in Bengaluru already........

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