MSV-2035 Astronomy Document - Inside Design - FINAL - FINAL

Astronomy & Astrophysics 99 8 THE INDIAN A&A COMMUNITY: STRENGTHS AND FUTURE OUTLOOK The Astronomy & Astrophysics community is on a rapidly growing curve and we expect this trend to continue. To provide some background, we quote from the executive summary of the Decadal Vision document prepared almost twenty years ago in 2004 under the aegis of the IndianAcademy of Sciences: “The committee is of the view that under the prevailing conditions and circumstances, it would not be desirable or profitable to undertake the construction of a large observing facility. Instead, the priority during the next decade should be to consolidate the existing facilities and, at the same time, groom the next generation of astronomers who would, in due course, take the next major initiatives.” The prevailing conditions referred to were the then small size of the community and sub-critical numbers in most areas. The vision to strengthen the community and then embark on more ambitious projects has since then been successful. Involvement of industry in many projects has also given a boost to these efforts. This growth in the last decade has been spurred by participation in mega projects. A related aspect is the addition of Astronomy & Astrophysics groups inmore universities andmany IISERs and IITs. The present strength of the A&A community stands at about 500 researchers with a regular position in an established organisation. In addition, there are over 100 post-doctoral fellows and 600 Ph.D. students, all spread over more than 80 research institutions and university departments across the country. The growth of the community over the years is also clearly reflected in the increasing number of participants at the annual meetings of the Astronomical Society of India (ASI). Further, the past few years have seen an increase in the proportion of young researchers, increasing to about 70% during the 2023 annual meeting (as shown in Figure 12). It is also important to note the influence of the availability of world-class observing facilities on the growth. For example, the number of individual authors from India inAstroSat papers stands at around 530, withmany of them fromoutside the conventional astronomy centers. To further illustrate the growth, we consider the data on publications from India in journals where research in astronomy, astrophysics and associated fields is published. Note that this has overlap with fields like astro-particle physics and theoretical high energy physics, and hence some mixing with these other fields is present in this data. This is shown in Figure 13 where we see that there has been a rapid growth in the number of publications inA&Ain the last 25 years. Number of publications is not the only parameter, it is important to see how these are being received by the larger community. Figure 14 indicates that the index of astronomy publications from India has grown by a factor of four since 1997. This is for same set of publications shown in Figure 13. We see that out of the approximately 1000 publications in 2015, more than 70 publications had more than 70 citations by the end of 2020. Thus, the number of well-cited publications from India has also increased significantly over the years. h- It is also of interest to see whether the growth of publications is vertical, wherein the older centres of research contribute most of the publications, or whether there has been horizontal growth also with new centres coming up. A study of contributed papers from the Astronomical Society of India meetings in the last ten years shows that the number of distinct affiliations from where contributed papers originate has grown significantly. A number of university departments, IITs and IISERs have formed astronomy groups during this time. The share of these new groups to contributed papers in the annual meetings of theAstronomical Society of India, as well as in best paper and best thesis awards is growing. This is encouraging as it indicates not only the formation and growth of new centres, but also that they are contributing quality research. MEGA SCIENCE VISION-2035