Abstract
Governments spend billions in funding research in basic sciences, but no one agrees on what is the best way to distribute the money. Grading and ranking grant proposals as in a competition is the usual procedure adopted by funding agencies around the world. But researchers need to spend a significant fraction of their time preparing the proposals, while reviewers must either spend a lot of time going through them or scan most of them quickly, making it an unfair evaluation. Science can be made better if scientists are able to spend more time doing research and less time competing for research grants. In this essay I suggest a more efficient way of funding research in basic sciences, one that requires a much lower time commitment from both researchers and reviewers. This not only leaves more time for both groups to do science, but also helps to make the distribution of research funds more equitable.
Amitabha Lahiri