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Fusion to improve higher education

A. Parthasarathi

There needs to be more interaction between the universities and the major research institutions in both the private and public sectors.

DISTINGUISHED ASTROPHYSICIST Jayant Narlikar in a recent newspaper article diagnosed why much of our higher education system and research and development (R&D) laboratory system are so poorly connected in contrast to the situation in most industrialised countries. Prof. Narlikar drew attention to the "two-box disease" afflicting our universities and government-funded R&D laboratories — that is, they work by and large in isolation. Indeed, this has been a subject of discussion in scientific circles for almost 50 years.

It is my submission that the origins of the disease go back to the way we did two things. One, the structuring of our major R&D organisations — the Departments of Atomic Energy, Space, Electronics, Ocean Development, Non-conventional Energy Sources, and the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). Two, the manner of setting up major research institutes — the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, the Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, the Institute for Plasma Research, Gandhinagar, the Centre for Advance Technology (CAT), Indore, the Mehta Institute of Mathematics and Mathematical Physics, now the Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad, and the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, to name some.

These institutes, and many others like them, were set up as munificently funded "islands of excellence" with no obligation on the part of their research staff to teach in the universities. The rationale was that our universities were far too conservative in thinking and far too rigid in terms of administrative and financial practices to enable creative work at "the cutting edge" of internationally competitive research.

It is one of the great tragedies of our science and technology system that universities were not given more autonomy in policy-making and operations, nor freed from a hierarchical work culture. Instead, the leaders of our scientific community reached the erroneous conclusion that the universities were irredeemable. And that, if we were to achieve world-class levels of research and knowledge generation, we would need to set up new greenfield research institutes outside the university system with better levels of funding and operational autonomy.

This divide between the two types of institutions, one with poor facilities and dedicated solely to teaching at both graduate and postgraduate levels, and the other, elite research institutes, has created "a deep and highly deleterious dualism." There has been little will on the part of the leaders of our scientific community to correct this.

Those of us who got advanced degrees and did research at major universities abroad have seen on these campuses major R&D centres funded by the U.S. and U.K. Governments. For example, you will find on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a 150-foot tower carrying advanced instruments set up and financed by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) of the U.S. Government. A major research institute of the NOAA is at the foot of the tower. What is more, many if not all of the senior research staff of that NOAA Centre are deeply involved in not only postgraduate but also the undergraduate teaching programmes of MIT.

However, neither major government R&D agencies nor universities seem to have appreciated the significance of such partnerships for the health of Indian science and technology. This when the primary mission of universities should be generation, and imparting, of knowledge to the younger generation by the older generation of scientists and technologists. It is of course absolutely imperative that further expansion of the dualism referred to earlier end.

Adoption an option

But that by itself will not solve the problem. Science and technology agencies and departments should each adopt two to three universities in the proximity of their major R&D centres. Their senior scientists could then undertake undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and provide full access to the laboratories, libraries and computer centres of the R&D centres to the faculty of the adopted universities. They could welcome a one-year secondment of the faculty to the R&D laboratories as visiting scientists/technologists to first update themselves in terms of the latest developments in a chosen field and then to actually undertake R&D in areas of interest to them and to their university in the laboratories concerned.

Such visiting faculty from the adopted universities should be seconded to the major R&D centres for a period of one year and paid salaries fully comparable with those of the full-time research scientists and technologists. The faculty from the adopted university should during their one-year secondment be fully funded by the adopting laboratory to attend international conferences, and visit research centres in their areas of specialisation in the highly industrialised countries.

Such a programme can have a tremendous impact on the morale, motivation, mindset, and scientific and technical competence of the faculty from the adopted universities. It may be asked from where the funding for such a programme would come. With the giant budgets of the major government S&T agencies indicated above, funding can be very easily met. This I can certify from my own experience as Secretary of one of the major scientific agencies, the Ministry of Non-Conventional Energy Sources.

Such a "twinning" programme should be supplemented and complemented by a massive funding of R&D projects in the adopted universities by the major science and technology agencies. Some movement in this direction has taken place in the last few years. But it has been done in an uncoordinated and individualistic manner. Moreover, those programmes are still very much in their infancy.

To give an example, the total amount of R&D funding in the university sector by the science and technology agency with the largest budget, the DRDO (annual publicly known budget is around Rs.3500 crore) is currently running with barely Rs.50 crore a year and that too only due to the vision and commitment of two individuals — the former Director General Dr. V.K. Atre and his then Adviser (Extramural Research), Dr. V. Siddhartha.

It should be a matter of national science and technology policy cutting across all agencies that by the year 2010 they will invest at least 10 per cent of their annual budgets into twinning programmes. Besides, they should commit themselves to having their best scientists and engineers design and induct fully contemporary teaching programmes in their adopted universities. This should not only be in terms of supervision of Ph.D. students but of lectures to postgraduate and undergraduate students.

Our country has enormous science and technology capacity today but the lifeblood of that capacity, namely young scientists and engineers coming out of the universities, is in serious danger of drying up. This could affect the R&D programmes of the so-called mission-oriented science and technology agencies very severely. This is the one overriding problem facing our science and technology programmes and, indeed, our universities.

The country has two apex scientific advisory committees — the Scientific Advisory Committee to the Cabinet (SACC) headed by R. Chidambaram, Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government, and the Scientific Advisory Committee to the Prime Minister (SACPM), chaired by the distinguished chemist and Emeritus Director of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore, Prof. C.N.R. Rao. The Government should, hence, be able to undertake the kind of reform outlined above with a sense of urgency.

(The author is a former Secretary to the Government of India who served in various scientific departments.)

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