India Risks Losing the Ability to Build Its Own Scientific Instruments, Climate Report Warns

A roadmap prepared by India's climate research community has raised a sharp warning: the country has nearly lost the capacity to design and build its own scientific instruments. As a result, much of India's climate observation now depends on imported equipment, which is often run for years without proper calibration. The scientists say this has led to flawed data appearing in national and international research journals, which in turn raises doubts about the credibility of Indian science.

The warning is part of the Mega Science Vision-2035 (MSV) report on Climate Research. This document is a long-term roadmap drawn up by the climate research community, with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, acting as the lead institution. It was submitted to the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) to the Union government and was made public in the first week of June 2026. Importantly, the report is described as a community document reflecting the hopes of researchers. It is not a mandatory government policy, and its projects are only indicative.

The concern over instruments sits uneasily beside the government's push for self-reliance, or Atmanirbhar Bharat. To boost domestic manufacturing, public scientific institutions were made to use the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) portal, which requires buying from the lowest-bidding India-registered vendor. Scientists found this rule a hurdle when they needed custom-built, high-precision equipment that local vendors could not supply, while the alternative of a global tender brought long bureaucratic delays. In June 2025, the Finance Ministry rolled back some of these rules after complaints about poor-quality materials. It allowed selected institutions to bypass GeM and empowered their heads to clear global tenders worth up to 200 crore rupees.

The timing matters because India is already living with the harmful effects of a warming climate, from sharper heatwaves and unpredictable monsoons to faster melting of Himalayan glaciers. These are exactly the trends that reliable, well-calibrated observations are meant to measure.

The MSV exercise has historically been used to plan large, long-term projects in fields like nuclear and high-energy physics. For the first time, it has been extended to climate research, ecology and astronomy. The climate working group was chaired by IISc Professor S.K. Satheesh and former INCOIS director S.S.C. Shenoi, and drew on consultations with about 3,200 researchers, with inputs from a panel of national and international experts.

Beyond instruments, the report listed several gaps and priorities. It called for an indigenous Earth System Model built from first principles, rather than the present Indian models that are largely adapted from the United States or Europe. It also flagged weak research on clean energy, carbon capture and storage, and the poor linking of environmental data with health data.

On the energy transition, the scientists urged long-term studies on the climate effects of the rapid, uncontrolled growth of large solar and wind plants, saying these effects remain poorly understood. They were careful to add that this is a caution, not opposition. Renewable energy, they said, should still be given priority so that the momentum of the last five years is not lost. India has pledged 500 GW of non-fossil capacity by 2030 and crossed the halfway mark on installed non-fossil electricity capacity in 2025, ahead of its Paris Agreement target. The report also recommended scientific methods to estimate the social cost of carbon and a way to apply the polluter pays principle, while protecting the poor from the burden of any carbon tax.

To deliver on these goals, the report proposed eight mega projects covering observatories, satellites, indigenous sensors and adaptation science, phased across three blocks of about five years each until 2035. The estimated cost ranges from about 795 crore rupees under a modest scenario to about 1,359 crore rupees under an ambitious one, which the report calls modest by the standards of India's flagship science missions.