Expert Comment

Towards a national R&D movement

Over the past few decades, technical education in India has witnessed massive growth in terms of number of institutions (1,500 engineering colleges currently) with an estimated admission capacity of 500,000 students annually. However, informed academics are deeply concerned about the poor quality of education dispensed by the great majority of technical institutions. A NASSCOM study indicates that only 25 percent of India’s technical graduates are employable in the IT industry.

A root cause of the poor learning outcomes of our technical institutions is the conspicuous lack of research culture. Neither managements nor faculty of the great majority of technical institutions regard R&D — academic or sponsored — as an important activity. They are satisfied if their institution gets reasonably good students to fill up admission capacity, and if graduates are able to secure placement in industry in adequate numbers.

The requirement of the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) that Ph D is a qualification prerequisite for assistant professors and professors was driven by a need to encourage faculty to engage in research (because writing an original research thesis is the pre-condition for award of a Ph D). In similar fashion, AICTE’s National Board of Accreditation (NBA) criteria stress institutional collaboration with industry, continuing education, research publications, and other features to build academic institutions of high standards. The NBA accreditation system demands that technical institutions engage in R&D, and that faculty are active in publishing research papers in high-impact peer-reviewed journals.

Unfortunately quite a few academics question the need for possessing a Ph D qualification to teach undergraduate and often, even postgrad students. Not only do they regard research competence as unimportant, they seem unaware that for knowledge transfer from teacher to student to occur, new knowledge needs to be continuously created through sustained research activity.

Therefore it’s hardly a matter of surprise that in the list of the top 500 universities worldwide announced a couple of years ago by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, only three of our institutions (IISc and two of the seven IITs) were included. That’s because research capability and achievement was given heavy weightage in the study. According to the Essential Science Indicators Database, for the period 1994-2004, India’s position is 13th in terms of number of research papers (China 9th), and 21st in terms of number of citations (China 18th).

A common excuse advanced by college and university faculty for not engaging in R&D activity is paucity of time. On analysis, it becomes clear that most academics devote too much time to ‘low-value’ activities such as routine testing and consultancy assignments, coaching classes, and even non-academic activities. Furthermore, most faculty are unaware of research funding opportunities and criteria adopted for assessing research proposals. Even those who write research papers tend to have a hazy idea of where to present/publish them, the quality of conferences, journals and the concepts of citation/impact factors.

How can this untenable situation be rectified? What steps do we need to take to produce and incentivise more Ph Ds who have to discharge the important roles of mentors, motivators, guides? These are questions in need of urgent answers.

First, we need high-quality research infrastructure — experimental and computational equipment. Secondly we need to develop a research culture with focus on quality and rigour in Indian academia. Simultaneously we need to promote opportunities for peer-to-peer interactivity, and generously fund deputation of academics to international conferences.

In short, we need a national R&D movement, as significant, for example, as our economic reforms kick-started more than a decade ago. We need university research policies which are supportive and promotional. They should motivate, incentivise, enable and reward research excellence.

In this connection corporate sponsored R&D offers great development opportunities to India’s more than 1,500 technical education institutions. The funds required for creating research infrastructure, for supporting research scholars engaging in research activity providing relevance and utility to end-users, and contributing to solution of nationally significant problems, need to be actively solicited. India’s academic community seems largely ignorant that within our national borders we have a large number of funding agencies offering substantial research grants to academic institutions.

In sum, to build research capability, institutional managements need to actively solicit the growing R&D budgets of government and corporate India. This requires preparation of detailed R&D project proposals with clear definition of outcomes. It is high time Indian academia realised that the drive for transforming teaching institutions into centres of research excellence must come from within.