Every newspaper is full of V. Ramakrishnan. After all he is of Indian Origin. So we have a cause to celebrate. (Okay, I am proud too. After all he too studied at M.S. University, Baroda.).
That apart, now will begin the usual question: Why can't Indians do well in India and win Nobel Prize.
I am not going to get into the merits of Nobel Prize. As all prizes go, this also involves lots of pushes and pulls. What I want to focus on is why it is difficult to do good research in India, especially in the Universities.
1. Faculty recruitment- The Universities, which abroad are the places where research is done, has been relegated to a second place. They are teaching workshops. We do not bother about the kind of faculty we hire at these places. Forget research, they do not even need to be good teachers! The research has been pushed into institutes but no one is asking where the students for these research institutes is coming from. The worst of it is that once a faculty has been hired there is no way of getting rid of that faculty short of retirement. So there is no motivation to perform. Actually, if you underperform you will be promoted and given all sorts of awards. There is a crying need to bring in the sort of tenure system into our Universities. You are booted out unless you perform both as a teacher and as a researcher. The UGC did propose a sort of evaluation for promotion but the teachers are against it. They do not want their teaching program to be evaluated because it can be manipulated. That is another problem- suggest anything and everyone will be ready to point out why it will not work. So unless faculties are expected to adhere to rigor, we can forget about good teaching as well as good research.
2. Faculty salaries- This is the bone of contention. Since salaries are decided by UGC, all of us get the same salary. There is no incentive to do good teaching or research. Am I going to get extra for putting in that much of work? Why can't the universities be allowed to decided who gets paid how much? Of course, there will be people who will tell you that this will lead to mismanagement but why can't we put a procedure in place to decide how much salaries will be paid?
3. Promotion- thanks to UGC an Assistant professor has to put in 9 years of work before he or she will be promoted regardless of how well they teach or how good they are as researchers. They have to, regardless of their expertise, do one orientation course and two refersher courses. No, don't ask me what good they are. I slept through them. I still have one refresher course to attend. Now, tell me what motivation will I have to be a good faculty? I do it because I have this inner urge to do something great but it is so frustrating at times that I feel like chucking the whole thing off. It is different that I have nothing else to fall back on and therefore, I plod along.
4. Money- Thanks to this policy of Universities as teaching workshops, money is scarce. Money is needed to buy chemicals as well as equipments. Science has moved away from using simple things to do research. The technology changes every day and we need to buy the sophisticated equipments to good research. We need expensive chemicals but where is the money to buy them? Invariably, every faculty is expected to write a grant. Which is a good thing. The bad thing is that how much money I am going to get from my grant is decided by a bunch of lunatic financial officers with no appreciation of science or research. I, for example, wrote a grant and asked for 20 lakh to buy equipments. I need a shaker incubator and a centrifuge very badly. I was given 10 lakhs to buy two items. Neither of them is a shaker incubator and a centrifuge. Even the equipment I am allowed to buy will not be the sophisticated version that I need but a simple one that will just help me to do some basic analysis. Now, tell me why should a financial officer decide what I should purchase and not purchase?
5. Procedural delays- To buy any equipment above 50,000 rupees (which invariably all equipments are) I have to get permission from the purchase committee headed by a finance officer. I have to get 4-5 quotes and am allowed to buy only from the person who quotes the least. Needless to say I have to spend time getting these quotes, presenting before the purchase committee and then only I can buy. It takes 6 months to get an equipment. This is not unique to Universities. Institutes too have to follow this procedure. This is ostensibly to reduce corruption but who ever wants to make money can still find loop holes to make money.
6. Infrastructure- The labs are invariably constructed by the great CPWD with more than 150 years of experience. They know how to get seepages correct, how to make sure that the drain does not work, how to do shoddy work, how to create a workplace that is generally not workable. Can we please get good lab spaces that are temperature controlled so that I do not have to figure out a process for summer that is different from of winter? The infrastructure is terrible. We still do not have good internet facility. We do not have access to library books and journals. Our libraries are the pits. Less said about them the better.
There is a good article in the rediff that talks about recruiting good faculty globally amongst other things.
The problem with us is that we are fond of talking and complaining. At some point we need to stop talking and start overhauling the system. Not so that we can get a Nobel Prize winner but because we need to put up a good education system. It is essential to remember that people like V. Ramakrishnan were taught by teachers who are increasingly difficult to find in our University systems.
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