“Laddoo (a sweet) making” is infamously compared to our research, as it involves integrating the small units called “ boonthi”; our researchers integrate small units (points) from various theses to make their own thesis, which they call a synthesis. Another great researcher breaks the laddoo , calling it analysis. This is the present research scenario in most of the educational institutions of our country. When I was working in a centrally run technical institution, we were all geared up to face an assessment audit by a team of experts as part of an accreditation process.
Deep rooted questions
We were in high spirits, keeping all the labs tidy and well formatted documents to show our process of imparting knowledge. The expert team arrived and asked few questions about research contributions of the department. We showed all the publications and grants of the department. One expert asked, “How many publications in IEEE and ACM Transactions are from your department? We could not answer boldly as we had one or two at that time. He said that the audit was almost over and the performance would also be measured based on the publications in those tier one world class journals or transactions, which inferred that the research culture of the department had to be improved upon.
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Generally institutions and departments are assessed based on its quality of publications in India and there are institutions, departments and labs, abroad that are assessed based on the number for Nobel Laureates they produce. If that is the case, how will our institutions fare on the global ranking index? Our students and teachers are users of the technologies innovated by other countries. Technology development has a lot of merits such as job creation, revenue generation and to a great extent national income. Presently our school system stresses more on producing marks, ranks or grades based outcomes and not on innovation and research skills among the students. The laboratory classes are neither conducted nor encouraged. Scientific temper and the seeds for research and innovation must be sowed during their schooling itself. This helps create a strong foundation in the subjects with a research affinity. One who aspires to teach an undergraduate student, must at least possess a PhD degree. The research culture has to be inculcated and nourished among the researchers in our institutions and world class research methodologies should be followed.
Dr. M. Joseph, professor of Computer Science and Engineering based at Thanjvur, who got his PhD from NITK, Surathkal, researches on Cinema and Biblical history, apart from Computer Science.