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 valuesand 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.
