Ahead of the presentation of the Union Budget, the Finance Ministry has announced changes that will provide greater flexibility to scientific Ministries to import and buy equipment necessary for research.

These changes, in the General Finance Rules (GFR), follow demands made for years by scientists, who have often said that restrictive rules on the purchase of research equipment had slackened the pace of research productivity.

The GFR, which are prescribed by the Finance Ministry, define the conditions under which public procurement is conducted, and they are periodically updated. The new exemptions are specific to the “scientific Ministries”, and include the Department of Science and Technology, Department of Biotechnology, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Department of Atomic Energy, Department of Space, Ministry of Earth Sciences, Defence Research and Development Organisation, Indian Council of Agricultural Research, Department of Health Research including Indian Council of Medical Research, and institutions conducting post-graduate research affiliated to Ministries.

The first of the changes are in raising the threshold price of goods that may be bought without going through a tendering process. Until May 20, when the relaxations came into effect, the threshold was ₹25,000. It has now been raised to ₹1,00,000.

The second is that for goods priced between ₹25,000 to ₹250,000, a purchase committee consisting of three members nominated by the Head of Department must survey the market to establish that it offers the most value for money and quality. That limit has now been raised from ₹100,000 to ₹10,00,000. However, and this is the catch most scientists are not quite happy with, these relaxations are only applicable once it is established that the required goods are unavailable on the Government e-Marketplace (GeM). The GeM is a government mandated website, such as the Amazon online marketplace, which lists sellers of India-made or assembled goods, and is administered by the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises. A general grouse against the use of GeM, particularly by scientists and researchers, is that they often need extremely customised equipment which often has to be imported, and may otherwise compromise the quality of research experiments.

“The increased upper limits are certainly welcome but the overall processes remain unchanged. For example, we cannot avoid GeM. For scientific institutions, we need a completely different set of guidelines, and this has been communicated by various bodies, including the Principal Scientific Advisor’s Office to the Finance Ministry,” L.S. Shashidhara, Director, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, said.

A senior official who is part of the scientific bureaucracy in India said on condition of anonymity that of the six demands presented to the Finance Ministry, four had been met, and there was a fair chance they would be reconsidered in the future. “The Finance Ministry is open to suggestions but they have a more holistic view. GeM is brought in to prevent misuse,” the official said.