The Office of the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India convened the first 'State Governments Nodal Officers Meeting' for the I-STEM Portal on September 21, 2026. Chaired by Dr. Parvinder Maini, Scientific Secretary, the meeting brought together nodal officers from 23 States and 4 Union Territories to strengthen state-level coordination for wider access to scientific and R&D infrastructure.
The I-STEM platform, conceived and supported by the Office of PSA and launched by the Prime Minister in January 2020, has expanded into a national resource with more than 31,000 scientific instruments across nearly 4,000 institutions and over 65,000 registered users. The platform requires listing of all publicly funded equipment costing above ₹20 lakh to strengthen the framework for shared access and optimal utilization of scientific infrastructure.
The meeting focused on five key priorities: strengthening institutional onboarding of state universities and research institutions onto I-STEM; expanding access for researchers, startups, MSMEs, and industry to discover specialized infrastructure; improving utilization efficiency of existing publicly funded equipment; supporting infrastructure planning to minimize investment duplication; and strengthening state-level coordination through nodal officers acting as links between state governments and the national I-STEM ecosystem.
Dr. Maini emphasized the need to ensure India's investments in scientific infrastructure are discoverable, accessible, and optimally utilized, while also highlighting the importance of initiatives like One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) for enabling wider access to scholarly resources. The meeting included detailed orientation on the platform's functionalities and noted that all existing similar portals (like CSIR's ANALYTICS portal) are being integrated with I-STEM through API linkages.