While the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan (VBSA) Bill drew controversy over the lack of a grant-giving function in the new agency, the question of grants that the University Grants Commission (UGC) has been giving out has come under scrutiny.The grants will be given directly by the Ministry of Education, which has said that feedback from the VBSA’s Regulatory Council on institutional performance will be the major factor determining fund quantum, with disbursal handled through mechanisms devised by the MoE rather than by the regulatory or academic councils.In any case, statutory UGC annual reports from year 2019-2024 and official parliamentary data show a widening gap in how the UGC has been funding Indian higher education: individual teacher-research grants have collapsed, general assistance to the country’s expanding pool of State universities remains a rounding error, and a handful of long-established institutions continue to draw the lion’s share of recurring grants even as the government’s own figures show India’s aggregate research standing improving.For half a century, a working or retired teacher at an Indian university or college who wanted to pursue research outside regular duties had a well-worn route: apply to the UGC’s Major Research Project (MRP) scheme, or its smaller counterpart, the Minor Research Project (MnRP), and receive an individual grant. The Commission describes the arrangement as support for “permanent, regular, working/retired teachers” to pursue research “in their chosen areas,” a provision in place “since the early 1970s.”Five consecutive UGC Annual Reports, each a statutory document the Commission must lay before Parliament under Section 18 of the UGC Act, 1956, show this once-routine pathway has all but disappeared. The same official record also shows that money meant to help India’s fast-growing pool of State universities develop is spread thin, while individual well-established institutions continue to draw large, steady sums.Set against this is a separate government account, given to the Rajya Sabha, for India’s improving standing in global research metrics. All three threads are drawn from primary government documents; together, they describe an Indian research-funding system that looks very different depending on which level of it- the individual teacher, the ordinary State university, or the country’s aggregate output, one examines.The collapse of individual teacher-research grants