The "863 program" should also be subjected to social supervision. More work needs to be done in order to make the program opener and fairer, says Ma Songde, Vice Minister of Ministry of Science and Technology. Ma made the remarks because some officials are interfering with academic research; some enterprises tried to win over the task through underhand connections; some task groups, taking a frivolous working style, failed to meet their commitments.

Since the implementation of the 10th Five-year Plan, the "863 program" has kept on improving the management. The measures it took include setting up expert board and task expert board; adopting management by levels; stipulating clearly that experts are not allowed to undertake concrete tasks so as to avoid the phenomenon "player serves at once as referee". Meanwhile a "supervision committee" has been set up to monitor the process of task implementation.

Despite the measures taken, Ma acknowledges a lot of work needs to be improved in terms of supervision and management. The investment into the program has risen greatly from an accumulated outlay of 5.8 bln yuan in the 15 years before the implementation of the "10th Five-year Plan" to 15 bln yuan in five years after entering the "10th Five-year Plan", and the scope of investment is enlarged as well. However, the openness and fairness of management of research has failed to make progress accordingly. As a result, the program has got much criticism in the following aspects:

The members of the board are busy with odds and bits in affairs and they are a bit too old and have little rights. A small number of government officials intervene the development orientation of the tasks; the phenomenon "entertainment, presenting gifts and establishing personal relationships" in research is on the rise along with enterprises' involvement in tasks. The inspection on the tasks valued at over 5 million yuan shows that some task groups do not work hard enough in researches. Some people even practice fraud.

To solve the problems, the ministry is now establishing an expert board, which is responsible for online appraisal of the tasks. Building of a credit system that is used to test the integrity of appraising experts is underway. From this year onwards, information of non-confidential tasks or subjects, namely the task groups, group-heads and expenditures will be published online.

By People's Daily Online