Total funding for science this year will reach an estimated 13.666trillion VND (about 510,000 USD) as the Ministry of Science andTechnology (MOST) has decided to focus investment on a number of keyscientific activities, the Vietnam Economic News reported.
In arecent working session with MOST, Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam saidthat to make the whole society more aware of the role of science andtechnology, it would be better to focus on key scientific sectors thanto spread the investment.
Vietnam had achieved severaloutstanding scientific and technological achievements such as ricegenome decoding and oil and gas drilling rig manufacture. These wereevidences for a good scientific investment and organisation model thatVietnam should continue to develop.
According to Director ofAgricultural Genetics Institute Le Huy Ham, previously scientificinvestment resources are limited and assigned to many universities,institutes, and science and technology centers.
1,670 existingscience and technology organisations in Vietnam, a country with GDPunder 200 billion USD, are too many and wasting investment, according toJapanese experts.
“Instead of spreading investment to thousandsof research institutes, universities, and centers, Vietnam should focusfunding on several best ones and on two or three key industries. Forexample, the Australian Research Council used up to 66 percent of itsscientific and technological funding to fund for five top universitiesin Australia and finally these five entered the list of 50 world leadinguniversities,” said Rector of Hanoi University of Agriculture Tran DucVien.
Recently, capital and development expenditures such assalaries and regular operational spending in more than 1,000 publicscience and technology organisations have accounted for nearly 90percent budget funding. Thus, just more than 10 percent budget fundingwas actually spent on scientific and technological researches andapplications.
Research projects should be prioritized in terms ofinvestment especially the most potential projects. Long-term researchprojects should be subject to periodic inspection on implementation.“Business and social communities will only be persuaded by specificproducts with obvious commercial value,” emphasised Pham Thanh Huy,Director of Advanced Institute for Science and Technology, HanoiUniversity of Technology.
According to Minister of Science andTechnology Nguyen Quan, experience of the most successful countries inthe world indicates that the right investment level and time foreducation and science and technology will create a strong incentive forsocio-economic development.
Therefore, MOST in collaborationwith the Ministry of Planning and Investment and relevant ministries ispreparing a scientific and technological development master plan tosubmit to Prime Minister, focusing on reduced rates of scientific andtechnological development investment, and increased investment rates inscientific and technological researches and applications until 2020,with a view to effectively reduce the financial burden for the statebudget.
The spending on scientific and technological researchesand applications will be allocated according to the principle ofreasonable investment thresholds for some key scientific andtechnological tasks, the most important for the overall development ofthe country, such as the national technology innovation programme andscientific and technological product development programme.-VNA