Cow urine can fight off the Chikungunya virus.

Cow urine’s chemical compounds make it an important agricultural and medicinal product.

These may sound like claims on a fringe website. But they actually are central arguments of research carried out by the country’s premier scientific institutions under SUTRA-PIC – short for Scientific Utilisation through Research Augmentation, Prime Products from Indigenous Cows.

Both are now being reassessed by the journals that published them – ACS Publications and Springer Nature – after complaints by Dr Cyriac Abby Philips, known online as The Liver Doc.

They are two of 10 SUTRA-PIC papers published over the past decade, funded with Rs 98 crore of public money.

But to understand why a cow urine paper from a premier Indian technical institute is not really about cow urine, it helps to start somewhere duller: a number that has barely moved in 15 years. 

Funds shrinking for overall research

The last year for which India has actual data from Gross Expenditure on Research and Development is 2020-21. That year, the country spent 0.64 percent of its GDP on research and development, a figure still cited as current in the Economic Survey 2025-26 simply because nothing more recent exists. 

Oddly, that is a smaller share of the economy than India was spending in the year the global financial crisis hit. The Department of Science and Technology's own data shows Gross Expenditure on R&D at around Rs 39,437 crore in 2007-08, worth 0.79 percent of GDP that year, climbing to a peak of 0.84 percent the following year, and then slowly losing ground even as the absolute rupee amount kept growing.

By 2020-21, India was spending Rs 1,27,380 crore on research, more than triple the 2007-08 figure, and yet that spending amounted to a smaller slice of a much bigger economy: 0.64 percent, a number the Economic Survey 2025-26 itself calls “substantially below the global average”. 

Put next to other countries, the gap appears larger. The United States spends 3.48 percent of its GDP on R&D, China 2.43 percent, South Korea a striking 4.91 percent. Even the BRICS comparisons India tends to reach for are not flattering: Brazil manages 1.3 percent, Russia 1.1 percent. On this particular metric, India's closest company, per the DST’s own charts, is South Africa.

The more revealing number though, is not how much India spends but who is spending it. Roughly 59 percent of the country's R&D funding comes from government sources: 43.7 percent from the Centre, 6.7 percent from the states, 8.8 percent from higher education institutions. Everywhere else in the world, private industry is the dominant force in research spending, contributing just over a third here, a ratio that is close to the exact inverse of India’s competitors. Business enterprises fund 77 percent of R&D in China, 75 percent in the United States, 79 percent in South Korea.

In India, that figure has sat around 40 percent for five years running, according to the DST’s 2022-23 statistical compendium. 

In simpler terms, this means a rupee spent validating a Puranic reference to metallurgy, is a rupee that does not go toward a National Quantum Mission scholar’s stipend. 

A parallel architecture

The government’s framing of this dilemma, delivered through the Economic Survey, is that the shortfall calls for more institutional scaffolding.

Like the Anusandhan National Research Foundation under a 2023 Act, a Research, Development and Innovation Fund with an outlay of Rs 1 lakh crore over six years, Rs 20,000 crore of it earmarked for the coming fiscal year alone, designed to catalyse private investment and fund projects at advanced stages of technological readiness.

These interventions sit alongside an architecture built specifically to fund the scientific validation of ancient Indian texts and practices. And this second architecture has been running in parallel for over a decade with remarkably little scrutiny relative to its ambitions.

SUTRA-PIC is perhaps the clearest example of this.

A 2020 Lok Sabha reply said the initiative would be coordinated by IIT Delhi and stitched together across seven ministries and departments, with the DST as the nodal agency. Curiously, the reply signed by Dr Harsh Vardhan in his capacity as both Health Minister and Science Minister, included an annexure in which scientists’ objections were logged alongside the government’s rebuttals.

Scientists had objected that science cannot begin by presuming the truth of a belief. The government’s written response was that the underlying hypothesis was “already proven” at the time the ancient texts were composed, and that what remained was simply to test it “with modern scientific technologies.”

This is the description of a conclusion in search of a methodology, issued not by a fringe institution but by the Ministry of Science and Technology, in an official reply tabled in Parliament. Let that sink in.

But SUTRA-PIC is not an isolated case. 

The DST’s SATYAM programme has for years funded yoga and meditation research at institutions like AIIMS, NIMHANS and IISc, with individual grants ranging from Rs 8 lakh to Rs 80 lakh.

But scroll through the SATYAM project list and it is not hard to find studies whose framing alone should have invited more scrutiny than they got. 

One sanctioned project, worth Rs 35.36 lakh, set out to investigate stem cell markers and their “neuro-cognitive correlation” after practising a common AYUSH yoga protocol. Another, worth Rs 24.89 lakh, examined whether Sudarshan Kriya breathing could alter hormonal changes and menopausal symptoms through a randomised controlled trial.

Then there is the Indian Knowledge Systems division, set up under the Ministry of Education and administered through AICTE, whose founding documents state its mission in language rarely seen in a research funding call: to help India become “Vishwaguru,” a world teacher, by training a generation of scholars who will “show the Indian way to the world”. 

Its 2022-23 Competitive Research Proposals Program funded work across thematic areas, from metallurgy and chemical sciences to Vaastu and what it calls “New universal sociological models based on emic perspective,” in grants of Rs 5 to 20 lakh, and buried in its eligibility criteria is the detail that does the most work: every funded proposal must be built around a primary Sanskrit or classical text, and the review process itself is designed so that a project’s ideological fit, whether it “integrates IKS in a comprehensive way,” is assessed in Phase I, before any question of scientific merit is reached in Phase II.

A project cannot survive on rigour alone if it fails the civilisational test first. 

Among the representative proposals the programme has funded is one studying Pashu Ayurveda formulations as alternatives to antibiotics in cattle, a project that borrows the real and urgent language of the antimicrobial resistance crisis to dress an unrelated ideological commitment in the vocabulary of a genuine public health emergency, and which threads back, inevitably, to the same bovine preoccupation that runs through SUTRA-PIC.

What the money actually does

The theoretical case against this architecture is the clear opportunity cost. 

There is an empirical case against it too, from two kinds of paper trail: a state government’s probe into a completed project, and CAG’s review of an entire funding pipeline.

The first is Nanaji Deshmukh Veterinary Science University in Madhya Pradesh, which received Rs 3.5 crore in 2011 to research Panchgavya, the traditional five-product cow-derived formulation, as a possible treatment for cancer and tuberculosis. The project ran for seven years, from 2011 to 2018, and the Jabalpur Collector ordered a probe into it.

Roughly Rs 3 lakh was spent on unverified air travel, Rs 15 lakh on vehicle repairs and fuel, a car purchased from the same person who headed the research, and Rs 1.75 crore on raw materials and machinery that investigators found to be overpriced. The investigating officer’s characterisation of the seven years of work was that there was little evidence of meaningful research output. The report has been submitted; action, as of writing, is still awaited.

The second is more recent and considerably larger in scope: a 2025 CAG performance audit of the AYUSH sector in Uttar Pradesh, examining how the state managed funds across Ayurveda, Unani and Homeopathy services between 2018-19 and 2022-23.

Against budgeted revenue expenditure of nearly Rs 8,913 crore across the three streams over that five-year period, the state actually spent only about 71 percent of it, leaving Rs 2,696 crore unutilised.

Under the National AYUSH Mission specifically, where the Centre and state split costs 60:40, utilisation ranged from a low of 61.69 percent to a high of 96.19 percent across the five years, and the CAG traced Rs 12.89 crore transferred to the Director of Ayurveda Services that sat, un-utilised, in a state bank account, later moved to a central nodal account only after intervention. A separate medical construction project in Banda, sanctioned in 2010 for Rs 29.67 crore, saw its executing agency park released funds in a savings account earning interest for over a decade while the building itself remained incomplete more than 14 years past its original deadline. The Uttar Pradesh government’s response to the CAG, on the record, was that there was “no loss to the government” because unspent balances were eventually surrendered.

In February 2021, the RKA, a Commission set up specifically for cattle (read cow) welfare, had planned a nationwide “cow science” exam, with the University Grants Commission writing to nearly 900 vice-chancellors urging them to encourage student participation; the exam drew more than five lakh registrations before its study material, which included claims that cow milk contains traces of gold and that cattle slaughter is linked to earthquakes, drew enough academic backlash that the government postponed it indefinitely, a day after its chairman’s term happened to end, and disowned it soon after.

Nobody was prosecuted, no institution was defunded, and the same architecture of ministries that produced that exam is the architecture still funding SUTRA-PIC’s papers today.

What the fellowship delays reveal

None of this exists in a vacuum.

The same government that told scientists in 2020 that ancient texts had “already proven” what SUTRA-PIC merely needed to test has, in its own parliamentary replies, acknowledged that “transitions during the last three years led to some difficulties in disbursement of fellowships,” bureaucratic language for a problem that outlets covering it in plainer terms have described as leaving PhD scholars across the country in limbo for months at a stretch.

CSIR fellows have had awards arbitrarily terminated over portal glitches; DST-INSPIRE scholars have waited on announcements that determine whether they can pay rent. These are not large sums by the standard of a Rs 98-crore programme or a Rs 2,696-crore unspent AYUSH allocation. A JRF stipend is a few tens of thousands of rupees a month. 

The Economic Survey’s data on India’s research output complicates any simple story of decline.

India’s publication count rose from roughly 60,000 papers in 2010 to nearly 1,50,000 in 2020, at a growth rate more than double the global average, and the country now ranks third worldwide in output, behind only the United States and China. It is also not the number that should be reassuring anyone, because publication volume measures activity, not the integrity of the pipeline producing it.

The question this raises is not whether Ayurveda, metallurgy, or Vaastu are unworthy of study. Nobody is denying that historical and cultural scholarship on all three has genuine value.

The question is what standard of evidence any of it should meet before receiving money from a research budget that is not growing, in a country where a scientist waiting for a routine stipend and a programme built to pre-confirm a civilisational hypothesis are drawing from the same shrinking pool, administered by the same ministries, and answerable, in the end, to the same Parliament.

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