In 1976, the 42nd Amendment did something few constitutions have attempted. It made scientific temper a civic obligation. Article 51A(h) placed on every Indian citizen the duty to “develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform.” The clause was quietly radical – not because it mandated knowledge, but because it framed a way of thinking as essential to democratic citizenship. Nearly fifty years on, that framing deserves serious examination, not as a tribute to constitutional foresight, but as a measure of how far institutional reality has drifted from it.The numbers are the obvious starting point. India’s gross expenditure on research and development has remained stubbornly below 0.7% of GDP for over a decade. The global average stands at 1.8%. South Korea spends 4.9%. Even among middle-income economies, India is an outlier. The private sector, which typically drives R&D dynamism as economies mature, contributes only about 36% of India’s total research expenditure – compared to 70-80% in China, the United States and Germany. This is not a talent gap. India produces more STEM graduates than almost any country on earth. It is a structural gap, rooted in how research institutions are governed and the incentives under which they operate.That governance problem runs deeper than budgets. Public research institutions function under tight regulatory control, with limited academic and financial autonomy. The contrast with Germany’s Max Planck and Fraunhofer Institutes, which combine clear public mandates with significant operational independence, is instructive. The Anusandhan National Research Foundation, operationalised in 2024 with considerable fanfare, has not yet resolved the persistent problem of research grant disbursal delays. Projects stall not because scientists are absent but because administrative systems are slow. The infrastructure for inquiry exists; the institutional conditions for it are often absent.The quality of research outputs compounds these concerns. India now ranks third globally in life sciences paper retractions, behind only China and the United States, a pattern that reflects the distorted incentives of an ecosystem that rewards publication volume over rigour. The National Institutional Ranking Framework has recently begun penalising universities with high retraction rates, which is a welcome corrective. But fixing the signal without changing the underlying incentive structure is unlikely to produce lasting improvement.Also read: Cash Crunch, Research Void and Guest Faculty Surge: The Collapse of Social Sciences in IndiaWhat has received less attention is the constitutional dimension of this failure. Article 51A(h) places the duty of developing a scientific temper on citizens, but the constitutional logic implies a reciprocal obligation on the state. A citizen cannot reasonably be expected to develop a spirit of inquiry in a university system that penalises questioning, or in a research environment where independent thought is structurally constrained. The duty the constitution assigns to individuals is only fulfillable if institutions make it possible. That precondition has not been consistently met.The non-justiciability of Fundamental Duties is a known feature of Indian constitutional design. Article 51A cannot be enforced through courts and no institution is formally accountable for its implementation. This produces a specific kind of policy vacuum: there is no body tasked with assessing the institutional conditions for scientific temper, no benchmarking framework, no periodic review of whether the state is creating the environment the clause demands. The contrast with Fundamental Rights, which carry justiciability, remedies and decades of jurisprudence best illustrates this asymmetry.The comparative picture offers some direction. Countries that have meaningfully narrowed their science-society gap, including Finland, South Korea and Taiwan, have done so primarily through institutional investment rather than communication campaigns. Research autonomy, doctoral pipeline support, stable long-term funding and governance frameworks that insulate scientific institutions from short-cycle pressures: these are the common denominators. India’s challenge is less a shortage of institutions than a shortage of institutional urgency, the sense that science governance is a first-order policy priority rather than a residual one.None of this requires locating blame. It requires locating the problem accurately. The science-society disconnect in India is not primarily a public awareness problem, solvable through outreach or curriculum reform. It is a governance problem – one of institutional design, incentive structures and accountability frameworks. Article 51A(h) named the aspiration in 1976. The work of building the institutional architecture capable of realising it remains, fifty years later, substantially unfinished.Ablaz Mohammed Schemnad is a researcher at Sobriety Press working on science communication and higher education policy. He holds postgraduate degrees from TISS Hyderabad and Sciences Po Lille.