On the promise and the peril of the ICMR Impact of Research and Innovation Scale
For as long as most working scientists in this country can remember, the currency of a research career in India has been the publication count and, somewhat more grudgingly, the journal impact factor attached to it. It is a currency this publication has watched shape careers, distort priorities, and quietly discourage precisely the kind of research — applied, local, slow to publish, difficult to place in a high-ranking international journal — that India’s public health actually needs. The Draft National Health Research Policy 2026 proposes to retire that currency and replace it with something more ambitious: the ICMR Impact of Research and Innovation Scale, a multidimensional framework that assigns explicit, standardised credit to clinical guidelines, patented technologies, policy briefs adopted by state governments, doctoral mentorship, and verified community health benefit, alongside conventional scholarly output.
We at Neo Science Hub welcome the intent behind this reform without reservation. We are considerably more cautious about the instrument itself.
The Right Diagnosis
The diagnosis underlying ICMR-IRIS is correct, and worth stating plainly: a research evaluation system built solely around publication volume rewards scientists for writing papers that satisfy international peer review, not for solving the specific, often unglamorous problems of Indian public health. A clinician who spends three years building a district-level tuberculosis screening protocol that state health departments actually adopt has, under the old regime, produced less career-advancing value than a colleague who published a bibliometrically respectable but practically inert paper in a mid-tier international journal. Any policy that corrects this asymmetry deserves serious support, and this one, in its ambition, has it.
The Risk the Policy Has Not Yet Named
But this publication has covered enough scientific institutions, in India and elsewhere, to know what happens to any metric the moment it becomes consequential for careers, funding, and institutional prestige: it gets optimised for, not fulfilled. The journal impact factor was itself, in its origins, a reasonable attempt to measure something real — scholarly influence — before three decades of career pressure hollowed it into a number gamed by citation cartels, salami-sliced publications, and strategic journal selection. There is no self-evident reason why ‘Publication-Equivalent’ credit for a policy brief, a patent, or a claim of verified community health benefit will prove more resistant to the same gravitational pull, and several reasons to suspect it may prove considerably less resistant, given how much harder these outputs are to audit independently compared with a peer-reviewed paper with a permanent public record.
A metric is only as trustworthy as the audit behind it. The draft policy has designed the currency with real care. It has said comparatively little about who will verify that the coins are genuine.
Consider the specific categories the new scale proposes to reward: verified community health benefit, policy influence adopted by state legislatures, mentorship and doctoral completions. Each is a legitimate form of impact. Each is also considerably more vulnerable to inflation, informal negotiation, and institutional favour-trading than a citation count ever was — precisely because the evidentiary trail for ‘a policy brief that influenced a state health department’ is far thinner, and far more dependent on relationships and reputation, than the evidentiary trail for a peer-reviewed publication indexed in a public database.
What We Would Ask the Ministry to Commit To
The reviewers who have examined this draft have themselves recommended a sensible safeguard: a two-year, multi-centre pilot validation of ICMR-IRIS before it is deployed for high-stakes decisions such as institutional core funding or national award allocation, tested across a genuinely representative range of institutions — national research institutes, university medical centres, private hospitals, state medical colleges — precisely because a scoring methodology calibrated on India’s best-resourced institutions will not behave the same way when applied to its most resource-constrained ones. We endorse this recommendation without qualification, and would go a step further: the pilot’s findings, including its failure modes and any evidence of gaming, should be published in full, not summarised for internal ministry use alone. A reform intended to restore trust in how India evaluates its scientists will not succeed if the mechanism for evaluating the evaluation itself is conducted behind closed doors.
India’s research culture does not need another metric handed down with confidence and revised quietly, years later, once its distortions have already shaped a generation of careers. It needs a metric introduced with the humility the exercise deserves — piloted, audited, published, and adjusted in public view. ICMR-IRIS has the right ambition. Whether it earns the trust the old system squandered will depend entirely on whether the Ministry treats its introduction as a scientific experiment, with the discipline that phrase implies, rather than as a policy announcement to be finalised and forgotten.
– Venkata Satya Prasad Potharaju
