India, Science and Technology:  2008

S&T Human Resources

 

 

 

 Higher Education and Research Training

 

 

 

P. Banerjee

 

A large part of the science and engineering doctorates out-turn of the country is provided by research institutions, notably the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the DRDO, and institutes under the Ministry of Defence, the department of space and atomic energy etc. Contribution of CSIR alone is quite significant and currently is possibly about 1500 doctorates every year. Out-turn of doctorates from the university sector is skewed in nature, with a few major universities (primarily the central universities which receive larger share of financing, have larger number of faculties and lower student-teacher ratio) producing most of the doctorates. For ease of comparison we can distribute teaching and research organizations under two broad groups: major, and the minor. The former receives disproportionately higher financial allocation and spends per output more of resources than afforded by the latter group named ‘minor’. Here we would like to examine how major organizations act as the mentor of minor organizations; in particular, how employability and employment-fact varies across types of organizations and types of cities.

 

Further, there are disparities in terms of quality. Out-turn from some of the major universities or well known research organizations such as the TIFR are believed to be of higher quality. These doctorate holders with higher quality receive multiple job offers. Another prevalent problem relates to the recruitments. Not only some of the lesser known universities but also the reputed institutes like IITs, TIFR and other well known national laboratories, such as the CSIR, face the competition from corporate recruiters, the global universities and the foreign R&D centres. The classical function of major universities to serve as the generator of both manpower and course contents of the minor universities or of the less-financed public R&Ds therefore suffers. Turnover of highly trained manpower has now several competing markets to join in, and the public institutions of research and teaching often fare as the less preferred destination. Only a few of the doctorates from major laboratories or major universities go back to their respective alma mater.  

 

The country currently is planning to deploy extraordinary amount of public resources in higher education in order to build a large number of new universities and several new research establishments. Securing appropriately trained, highly educated science and engineering manpower for this expansion would therefore prove to be the most critical. It should not be ignored that the doctorate-level research and training is being undertaken in institutions other than universities as well. Identification of institutions, which are generators of knowledge and training in advanced areas of S&T, would therefore be crucial.

 

In the following sections we will present data and analyses on the doctorates from various universities and research institutions in Indian cities. First part deals with the data collected through response-based case studies and the second part deals with data derived from the websites of various scientific institutions in India.

 

Research Training Provisions:

The response-based cases consist of total 530 researchers/academicians. However, the responses are only indicative and cannot be considered to be reflection on the actual states of affairs. These responses are limited in scope, are mostly from a few regions in the northern and eastern part of India as there was little response from the western and southern India. Data consists of a group of 137 respondents from Delhi, 101 from Kolkata, 17 from Bhubaneswar, 22 from Varanasi, 12 from Hyderabad, 6 from Bangalore and only 3 from Mumbai.  Of course this cannot be taken as representative of a very large number of trained and employed personnel in R&D and academia. Institution-wise, 23 respondents were from IITs, 37 from ISI, 23 from Bose Institute, 12 from CCMB, 12 from NEHU, 5 from ICGEB, 6 from IGIB and similarly. This data therefore can be used to reflect upon the employment pattern in the R&D organizations.

 

Fig. 1 shows the employability of persons trained in domestic institutes vis-à-vis institutes in the USA (interestingly it exhibits a pattern which is quite similar to the pattern being reflected in the website data discussed in the second part). As only a few persons with doctorates from USA return for the employment in the domestic R&D establishments, the table is overwhelmingly skewed towards both major and minor domestic institutions. There is also a difference in the pattern of employment. The website data also reflect s this pattern. The IITs and other reputed universities/institutes such as the IISC differ from the R&D institutes – the former employs more of doctorates and post-doctorates from abroad than the latter (the national R&D laboratories), which employ mainly the domestic trained personnel.     

 

 

Fig. 1: Organizations where case-respondents studied

 

The following figure describes the city-wise distribution of patterns of employment. It clearly exhibits that the non-metropolitan cities, such as Varanasi, employ more of personnel trained in domestic institutes.

 

 

Fig. 2: City-Wise Profiles of Organizations from where respondents received their trainings

 

Distribution of the capabilities of domestic institutes (mostly from the R&D and non-university areas) to train employable personnel in specific fields of the biomedical knowledge system are presented in the Table 1. It compares four sub-fields of immunology, biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology. Biochemistry as the old established sub-field appears to have distributed capabilities of providing training compared to genetics which is relatively new and which has less distributed capability to offer training. This distribution refers to the geography of some major and minor domestic and a few global institutes. 

   

 

Table 1: Specialization-wise Profiles of Organizations from where respondents received their trainings

 

Area	Level	Major Institutions	Minor Institutions	USA	Others abroad	NA
Immunology	PhD	4	9	0	2	2
Immunology	Post-Doc	5	1	4	3	3
Biochemistry	PhD	12	19	0	0	3
Biochemistry	Post-Doc	2	10	6	3	13
Genetics	PhD	12	21	0	2	3
Genetics	Post-Doc	5	5	7	9	12
Molecular Biology	PhD	27	15	1	1	8
Molecular Biology	Post-Doc	14	1	13	9	15

 

 

 Employment Types and Training:

Now we discuss the above findings in relation to the analyses of data gathered through browsing more than thousand homepages of academicians and researchers on their organizations’ websites.  Most of these pages are maintained only by major organizations in metropolitan cities that are well endowed with funding. This data exhibits the trends of employment by major educational and research establishments having/possessing highly educated manpower. Further, this data informs us on the employment worthiness of the manpower generated by the domestic institutions of higher learning and research. In fact, most universities do not maintain websites that provide access to individual homepages. The same holds true for most R&D laboratories. As a result the data presented here is partial and non-representative. A large number of homepages unfortunately do not contain complete bio sketches. Distribution of our data over organizations is skewed in favor of those, which receive very large funding. Such organizations we might describe as ‘major’, and this includes all IITs, TIFR, IISC , ISI, Bose Institute, IMSc, and similar others. The minor organizations will include those with comparably much smaller funding support.

 

Table 2: Profiles of cities from where researchers/academicians of most Indian major and few minor organizations, received their trainings

Source: Websites of Various Scientific Institutions and Universities

 

Table 2 exhibits a few distinct features, and the data, to recall, refers only to persons employed in institutes of teaching or R&D: small cities retain a significant share of masters outturn while at the doctoral studies the metropolitan cities Bangalore, Bombay, Delhi Calcutta, Chennai and a few small cities with IITs such as Kanpur or cities with major universities such as Pune hold the lion’s share. Other universities indeed hold little prospect. Additionally, turnover from minor institutes is small in quantity. However, for both doctoral and post-doctoral, USA remains the most important geography of schooling. Few domestic institutes offer post-doctoral training. This data cannot inform us on the actual turnover. However, partial reflection on the nature of turnover in higher education along with preferences of the public employers is exhibited. 

 

Table 3: Profiles of organizations from where researchers/academicians of most Indian major and few minor organizations, received or definitely did not receive their trainings

 

Source: Websites of Various Scientific Institutions and Universities

 

Table 3 offers further insights into quality of research training, employability of trained personnel and the pattern of employment in most major and a few minor institutions of research and teaching. This data has been collected from homepages of official websites, as in the previous tables, of mostly major universities and research institutes. One may thus conclude that the major institutions in India appear to be at par with global institutes, if not more preferred, in turning over employable personnel at both doctoral and post-doctoral levels; however, minor institutes appear to be more effective in turning over masters’ level personnel.

 

 

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