Opening remarks by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin:

Good afternoon, colleagues.

We are continuing our series of working meetings to prepare the draft federal budget for 2010-2012.

Today I suggest we talk about education and science. This involves a considerable amount of budgetary finances. In 2009, 384 billion roubles are allocated for education, and 76 billion roubles for abstract science. The total expenditure on applied scientific research within the framework of the federal targeted programmes has been set at 92 billion roubles.

In the next three years we will continue the reforms and projects that have been started in these areas, such as: the integrated modernisation of higher professional education, creating a network of federal and national research universities, and implementing programmes under the Russian Academy of Sciences and other state scientific academies.

It is clear that in preparing the new budget, as in many other areas, given the conditions of the global financial and economic crisis, which is unfortunately continuing, a certain optimisation of expenditure has to take place. But I would like to stress that cutbacks should not be made in priority areas; this must not be done mechanically. First of all we must be guided by the productivity of scientific research, the effective performance of the scientific institutions and the quality of the services they offer in terms of education.

Thus the rationale of our actions must remain unchanged: it is vital that we back the leaders, support the strong and in so doing raise the overall competitiveness of science and education in our country.

Development programmes in those areas on which our future depends must continue to be financed. In addition, it is vital to guarantee the necessary financing for priority areas promising innovative breakthroughs. We have spoken about this many times. These include: energy conservation, space exploration, nuclear research and medical and information technology.

And there is another subject I would like to focus on. It is estimated that about 50% of the federal expenditure on applied science is channelled through the Ministry of Education and Science, with the remaining resources distributed among various other ministries and agencies.

I have said this before, and would like to repeat it today: I think we need to raise the role of the relevant ministry in coordinating spending on science and technology. This should increase the return on investment, remove unnecessary duplication and doubling up, and should save us from frittering away resources.

Please, Andrei Fursenko, you have the floor.