India likes to speak of a knowledge century, often referring to it as a ‘glorious’ past. However, on the ground the space for scientific research and quality teaching and learning environment, in general, is weathering away. Social sciences, particularly, has shrunk into the margin – a shadow of its promise. The problem here is not the lack of talent. It is the consequence of policy dormancy and improper implementation of educational policies, along with stagnant R&D investment, erratic support for social science institutions, mass vacancies in faculties positions, and widely practiced ad hocism and contractual appointment of teaching staff. Together these trends are corroding teaching and research quality as well as the international standing of Indian institutions and scholarship.The recent publication of Ernest Aigner, Jacob Greenspon, and Dani Rodrik in World Development (2025) analysed the publication trajectories in the field of economics and offered a sobering reminder that the geography of knowledge is unequal as the geography of wealth. The United States (which constitutes only 16% of the global GDP) alone accounts for 65% of all research output in top-ten economics journals. In contrast, developing countries, constitute over 80% of the world’s population, are largely invisible in the global research publication. South Asia accounts for a mere fraction of global authorship, this imbalance has worsened over the last four decades.This academic asymmetry and imbalance is not confined to economics. It mirrors a deeper and more systemic erosion of scientific and social science research potential in the Global South, and nowhere is this more acutely felt than in Indian academia and universities. India – the country once envisioned as a self-reliant ‘knowledge society’ presently finds itself in a paradoxical position: a nation of 1.4 crore people with a vibrant youth population, but one where research and development, especially in social sciences is increasingly underfunded, institutionally adrift, and precariously staffed.The silent retreat of researchOver the past decades, India’s investment in research and development has stagnated at around 0.6-0.7% of the GDP which is well below the global average of 1.8% and far behind emerging economies like South Korea (4.8%) and China (2.4%). The social sciences in India occupy the bottom rung in this already meagre pool. As per the Department of Science and Technology, less than 3% of the national R&D expenditure is directed towards social science research. The Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), once an intellectual backbone of critical inquiry, has seen its budget fall by nearly half in real terms since 2014 when adjusted for inflation.This fiscal contraction has had visible effects manifested through delayed and irregular fellowship, reduction in project grants, delayed revision in salary and other allowances in the ICSSR network of institutions. Universities and higher educational institutions that once produced rigorous field-based studies in social sciences (primarily, Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science, Gender Studies and so on) are largely reduced to functioning merely as teaching institutions. The social sciences as a discipline, once the conscience of the republic, is being strangled by neglect and indifference in funding.However, in recent years, the social sciences have gained renewed traction through the revitalisation of research activities and growing interest, particularly in women-centric studies, tribal issues in general and Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs), as well as a stronger focus on longitudinal research.Despite the renewed interest and the apparent revival of the ICSSR, its impact remains largely confined to research, unlike the University Grants Commission (UGC), which has the ability to influence teaching and learning across the country’s education system.Ad hocism and the rise of guest faculties and academic gig workersThis crisis of the erosion of the social sciences in India runs deeper than a mere contraction of research funding. It is structural and institutional.Across the country, public universities and colleges are struggling with lack of full-time faculty positions which remain unfulfilled for years and in some cases even decades. These positions are being managed by ad hoc faculties and now increasingly by guest faculties, which has become a norm.In many state universities, the majority of teaching posts are filled by contractual or part-time instructors, often paid a very meagre amount (difficult to meet the basic needs), without any other benefits, research support or job security. These academic gig workers bear the full teaching load but are excluded from research projects. They are not even eligible for leading such projects.This has resulted in a culture of exhaustion and demoralisation even for capable researchers. Such perpetual uncertainty and unrewarding working conditions negatively affects the educational outcome, classroom engagement, creative learning, and students’ performance. When one is always unsure about next month’s pay check, scholarly creativity becomes a luxury. Further, the neoliberal restructuring of universities has created a two-tier system: a shrinking elite of full-time faculty who handle administrative work, and an expanding group of precarious staff who shoulder the teaching burden.Also read: Why We Need All Scholars – Foreign and Indian – to Study IndiaThis is not typical Indian anomaly rather a global trend. In their piece, Aigner, Greenspon and Rodrik noted that even when researchers from developing countries produce work of comparable quality as per the citation counts it is unlikely for the researcher to get published in top-ranked journals. The problem here is not the lack of intellect, but lack of institutional scaffolding. Without reliable employment, research funding, and intellectual freedom, it is impossible to sustain long-term creative, critical and engaged research endeavour and knowledge production because knowledge cannot grow in temporary quarters.The practice or norms of ad hocism in academic positions is increasingly hollowing out research and teaching, in general. In an uncertain, ill-treated, exploitative workplace environment one cannot work with eagerness and enthusiasm, which ultimately manifests in the form of lower performance of students. Further, such precarious working conditions significantly and adversely affect research output. Research requires sustained engagement, and the lack of stability creates a spiral of inadequate outcomes such as fewer publications in journals and limited participation in seminars and conferences of global repute.The collapse of continuity: Research quality and the crisis of local knowledgeThe contraction of stable, full-time academic faculty positions in universities and colleges has hollowed out the very environment of creative, and critical thinking, as well as knowledge production. Unlike natural sciences, social sciences thrives on continuous engagement in fieldwork, mentorship, and intergenerational dialogue.Now, in many universities – including higher‑education institutions in India – new faculty members are hired on short‑term contracts, often for just six months, until the contract ends or the funding runs out. Without a continuous and stable mentorship or institutional memory, research becomes episodic, disconnected, and devoid of cumulative depth.Considering the state of academics, the quality of both teaching and learning has unsurprisingly deteriorated. The classrooms are overcrowded and some departments handle 200-300 students per paper while the faculty available is often ineligible for leading research projects, denied basic facilities such as work leave, travel grants and fieldwork support. In such a scenario, teaching becomes mechanical and research becomes symbolic to a ritual rather than a pursuit of knowledge.India’s global positionThe analysis of Aigner et al. (2025) shows that despite a surge of research publications globally, authors from developing countries remain confined to the margins. Their representation has increased primarily in journals ranked below the 100, while it has barely improved in elite journals. Despite its direct link with the Global South fields like development economics, including international economics the authorship continues to be dominated by scholars based in Western and North American institutions.The share of social sciences and management (Economics and Business) in recent Stanford Global Research Ranking 2024 is very low at 1.7% despite the presence of a larger number of premier management institutions. Similarly, in areas where India should lead intellectual discourse such as rural development, gender studies, caste and inequalities, or minority studies, the majority of widely cited works are authored by scholars who are based abroad, often using data collected by Indian researchers (in Indian institutions) working on contractual or project-based employment. It is a peculiar outsourcing model where India provides the field sites, enumerators, and data, while interpretative authority and publication credit goes outward.A system designed for under performanceBehind such academic marginality lies a culture of ad hocism. Research funding in India is often guided by bureaucratic priorities rather than academic performances. Moreover, call for research grants has been sporadic, disbursements are often delayed, and the evaluation process is opaque.In recent years, the engagement and performance of ICSSR – as the leading institution for social science research – have shown signs of a possible revival. However, a majority of the ICSSR institutes are still struggling with lack of full-time staff, and are led by bureaucrats rather than academics. The regional centres of ICSSR are run in collaboration with the state governments. This is particularly problematic because bureaucrats appointed by the state may not be equipped to handle the academic nitty-gritty, yet they dictate, authorise, or reject research activities, leading to procedural delays and discouragement. In the absence of smooth institutional support, researchers spend more time chasing bureaucratic clearances and approvals, often having to explain and justify their work rather than focusing on conducting research.All these factors result in devastating consequences particularly in the field of Sociology, Anthropology and Political Science which require continuity, trust, and local presence. When scholars and researchers are forced into short-term consultancies, or rapid assessments dictated by project deadlines, the cultural and contextual nuance and ethical depth that define social science research is severely weakened.The devaluation of the social sciencesSuch degradation is not mere academic rather it is political. As state-run universities and institutions are nudged towards market alignment, disciplines that cannot directly produce patents, profits, or innovation indices are deemed expendable.This is ironic because, as global crises from climate change to pandemics reveal, the questions that matter most – socio-economic inequality, governance, social trust, migration, and the morality and ethics of technology – are quintessentially based upon social science epistemology. Yet, India’s higher education system continues to prioritise technocratic expansion over reflective knowledge.The lack of geographical diversity in research led to impoverishment of the very quality of knowledge. The discipline of Economics and by extension all the social science disciplines become parochial when dominated by a handful of countries (mostly Western developed ones). When the local experiences and voices are absent, theories turn blind to the plurality of the world. This is true in the case of Indian academia as well, when research becomes concentrated in a few metropolitan centres and provincial universities and institutions are reduced to a place of teaching only, we lose not just diversity but, more importantly, imagination and reflexivity which is the essence of academia.The human cost: Precarity and marginalisationThe lives behind this institutional crisis are stories of despair and resilience of temporary – contractual, ad hoc, and guest – faculty who shuttle between campuses on local transportations, doctoral researchers who fund their fieldwork through personal loans, and young sociologists and anthropologists, including others in the social sciences, who leave academia altogether and work in NGOs and in data collection and data entry jobs. Further, a significant percentage of young academics under 40 are on temporary employment under severe research constraints primarily due to lack of access to funding or mentorship.Also read: Government’s Shift to Private Research Funding: Is it the Right Move for India’s Future?Such precarity has both psychological and epistemic costs as it narrows intellectual risk-taking, discourages theoretical engagement, and promotes what is called ‘safe, fundable research’ that mimics existing global trends rather than critical engagement and challenges them. The epistemology of the social sciences thrives on dissent and critical reflection, but in the current academic environment, challenging the existing accepted knowledge is punished both economically and institutionally.A call to reclaim universitiesIt is not only the future of the social sciences at stake but also the future of public universities themselves. When the university ceases to be a site of open and critical inquiry, it becomes a factory of degrees where democracy is severely affected. The decline of social science research and thinking is not merely an academic problem rather it is a civilisational crisis.If India aspires to be Viksit Bharat by 2047, it cannot afford an underdeveloped and conformist mind. The social sciences inculcate reflexive epistemology and critical imagination, provide a moral compass, and preserve the historical memory that a society needs to navigate rapid change. Unless the situation of academic precariousness and the hollowing out of the social sciences changes, it will threaten the world’s largest democracy, turning it into a desert of ideas.Kishor K. Podh, obtained his Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Currently, he teaches sociology at Rama Devi Women’s University, Bhubaneswar.