New Delhi, Jan. 31: India and the European Union (EU) are moving to bolster their science partnerships at a time when Indo-EU joint research papers outnumber Indo-US research publications.

The first EU-India ministerial meeting on science, scheduled to take place in New Delhi next week, is expected to help expand Indian participation in the EU’s new research framework programme with a 54-billion euro budget for 2007-13.

Indian and EU researchers have been involved in 75 collaborative projects with funding of over 175 million euros under the sixth framework programme between 2002 and 2006.

Senior EU officials said the seventh framework programme will make it “much easier” for India to expand participation — and compete for slices of that giant research budget.

“The science summit is intended to generate interest in EU not just among students but even Indian scientists,” German ambassador Bernd Mutzelburg said today.

“Our objective is to intensify India-EU collaboration,” he added.

Germany currently holds the presidency of the EU.

The two-day EU-India science summit, opening on February 8, will be co-chaired by Indian science minister Kapil Sibal, German education and research minister Annette Schavan and European commissioner for science Janez Potonic, and will include science policy makers as well as top scientists.

India and EU members believe India has the expertise to participate in some of the 35 large-scale infrastructure projects that the EU has listed in a tentative roadmap for future research.

The roadmap envisions the establishment of deep sea floor observatories, biobanks and an extremely large telescope.

Mutzelburg said an analysis of research publications has shown that in all but two areas of science, joint publications involving Indian and European authors outnumber the publications by Indian and American authors.

In physics, the proportion of Indian joint publications with EU partners is 23 per cent, compared to 10 per cent with American researchers.

In chemistry, engineering, materials sciences and biology, the proportion of publications with EU is higher than that with the US.

Only in biochemistry and medicine do Indo-US joint publications exceed the number of Indo-EU publications.