The Draft NHRP 2026 creates an apex body to align India’s fragmented research ministries — but gives it no authority to compel the alignment it is meant to produce.
Every large bureaucracy eventually produces the same institutional artefact: a coordinating body, convened at the highest level, tasked with aligning agencies that each answer to a different minister, a different budget line, and a different parliamentary mandate. The Draft National Health Research Policy 2026 produces its own version of this artefact in the National Health Research Stewardship Committee — the NHRSC — an apex, inter-ministerial body chaired by the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India and convened by the Department of Health Research. Its remit, on paper, is expansive: to bring the Department of Biotechnology, the Department of Science and Technology, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the Department of Atomic Energy, the Department of Agricultural Research and Education, and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology into a single, coherent national health research agenda.
It is a sound idea, addressing a real and long-documented problem. India’s health research capacity has for years been scattered across departments that rarely speak to one another with any operational discipline, producing duplicated investments, orphaned initiatives, and priorities set in isolation from one another. What the draft policy does not resolve, however, is the question that determines whether any coordinating body actually coordinates: what happens when the agencies disagree?
Deliberation Without Enforcement
The NHRSC, as constituted in the draft, is a deliberative body. It is not granted statutory authority over the independent budgets of its member departments, nor executive power to compel any of them to redirect resources or defer to a shared national agenda when their own institutional priorities point elsewhere. The Department of Biotechnology, the Department of Atomic Energy, and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research each operate under distinct parliamentary mandates, with budget lines that answer to their own ministries. The NHRSC can convene them; it cannot, on the evidence of the text, bind them.
A coordinating body without a tie-breaking mechanism is not a governance structure. It is a standing invitation to disagree politely and proceed independently.
This is not a hypothetical concern. India’s scientific ministries have a long institutional memory of parallel investment — comparable diagnostic platforms developed independently by different departments, overlapping clinical research infrastructure commissioned without cross-reference, priority-setting exercises conducted in isolation. The draft policy is, in effect, betting that a shared table and a shared chair will be sufficient to end this pattern. Every comparable federal system that has attempted the same wager — and several are examined in the wider review of this policy — has eventually discovered that shared deliberation without a dispute-resolution mechanism tends to default to whichever department has the deeper budget or the more assertive minister.
The State Capacity Question
The federalism problem recurs, in a different register, at the sub-national level. The policy proposes State Health Research Stewardship Committees, empowering states and union territories to align research with local epidemiological priorities — a sensible response to the reality that disease burden, health infrastructure, and research capacity vary enormously across India’s states. But the draft implicitly assumes a baseline administrative and scientific capacity that simply does not exist uniformly across the country.
States with established medical research institutions and functioning health bureaucracies — the usual list of the more industrially and administratively developed states — will likely stand up their committees quickly. States with thinner administrative capacity, fewer research institutions, and stretched public health departments will not, and the policy offers no dedicated central mechanism to close that gap in the interim. Left unaddressed, a policy designed to reduce regional disparity in research capacity risks widening it instead, simply by requiring a capability that not every state currently possesses.
What a Working Model Would Require
None of this argues against inter-ministerial coordination as a principle; the alternative, continued fragmentation, is demonstrably worse. But a coordinating body that is serious about resolving cross-departmental conflict needs one of two things the current draft lacks: either an explicit, agreed escalation and arbitration mechanism for when departmental priorities genuinely conflict, or a phased, centrally resourced capability-building programme — a State Research Enablement Cell, seed funding, mentorship pairings with established institutes — to ensure the sub-national architecture does not simply replicate existing inequities in new administrative form.
India has, in other domains, built institutions that manage exactly this kind of inter-governmental friction with real teeth — the GST Council is the most obvious example of a body whose decisions carry constitutional and fiscal consequence, not merely deliberative weight. The NHRSC, as currently drafted, has the seating chart of such a body without the instruments. Whether the final policy supplies those instruments, or leaves the Committee to discover the limits of goodwill the way its predecessors have, will determine whether India’s health research agenda is genuinely national, or simply nationally convened.
– Maruthi Prasad Kavuri
