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Pursuant to my last post, I received the annexures that CSIR had forgotten to send me along with its RTI reply which I had blogged about over here. The information contained in the annexures is not the information that I had asked for under the RTI Act and this information is nothing but yet another attempt to mislead me.
I had asked for licensing revenues from CSIR’s patents but was provided instead with a list of ‘lab-wise extra-budgetary resources generated during the period of 2002-03 to 2011-12 (Rs. in crores)’. According to this list, which can be accessed over here & here, CSIR has reportedly generated close to Rs. 4,402.265 crores in extra-budgetary resources.
So what does the term ‘extra-budgetary resources’ mean? Well, I sent CSIR an email asking them what it means but I never received a reply. In any case I compared the list of licensed patents, that CSIR had provided me earlier and compared it to the present list and came to the conclusion that ‘extra-budgetary resources’ definitely does not refer to revenues from patent licensing as there is almost no co-relation between both lists. Some of the labs are showing revenues even in those years when they licensed no patents. My guess is that the list includes earnings from all sources which were not initially allotted through its annual budget. This would include contract research from the private sector and the public sector. My guess is that most of the Rs. 4,402.265 crores was earned ‘in-house’ i.e. through government projects and grants and not through patent licensing. It is highly unlikely that a lab such the National Aeronautics Laboratory (NAL) would have earned Rs. 501 crores in the last 10 years through private sector contracts. I for one am interested in knowing the work that CSIR did to earn this money. So I ask the question once again – Why is CSIR going out of its way to hide the revenues it has earned from patent licensing?
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