What is the issue?
India needs a better understanding of research culture for it to achieve its aspirations on higher education.
How is the research culture in India?
- A culture of research is largely missing in our institutions as faculty members lack collegiality and a singularity of purpose.
- Most of the publications happen due to individual initiatives for promotional needs rather than as purposeful collective effort.
- As, a majority of our institutions do not have any institutional research thrust.
- Also, in India research is approached with treating publication in international journals as the end in itself.
- As a result of this goal, faculty turn towards addressing unfamiliar problems of distant lands just to get promoted.
- They tend to undermine the long term goal of building an indigenous research culture to address the problems of our society.
- More importantly, the traditional core such as full-time faculty, liberal arts and scientific education, student services, the library, etc is declining.
- On the other hand, periphery such as outsourcing partnerships, corporate training, vocational courses, discrete research centres, etc is continuously expanding.
- This expanding periphery and contracting core, limits the institutions' governance structures to focus on advanced goals of research, etc.
What should be done?
- India institutions should incorporate shared, research-related values and practices towards building a safe home for testing new ideas.
- In the new competitive environment, institutions need to define a strategy that specifies the domain in and goals for which it will operate.
- Moving beyond specific practices as publications, India should take up comprehensive reviews and follow-up actions to evolve the right research culture.
- This can ensure a collective environment for research rather than few isolated individual researcher projects.
- Creating research friendly physical and administrative facilities in organisations are essential.
- Taking forward the government's proposal for a single higher education regulator, to replace the UGC and AICTE, can eliminate overlaps in jurisdictions.
- Government playing a facilitating role instead of a regulating one could help promote a research culture that India wants at present.
Source: BusinessLine
