Vinod2070
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Some real positive news. Despite all the hoopla and negativism, some solid steps are being taken in the education and health sector.
Science education and research in India undergoing a quiet but potentially huge transformation
His job is to build an IIT from scratch, as one of the eight new IITs the government is building. Jain has lofty aims: to build an institution that will be among the top 20 in the world in 50 years. As a beginning, he wants the IIT to break free from many selfimposed rules and assumptions.
Reimagining IITs
The IITs have long been known around the world for their teaching but they have a poor reputation for research. In a recent study of the top 20 engineering institutions in the world, Thomson Reuters found that the IITs had the lowest number of citations per paper between 1999 and 2009; they had 3.57 citations per paper compared to 10.50 for Stanford University, the highest for any engineering institution. The new IIT directors and some of the old ones are now bent upon changing the research culture in India, which is also a good way of attracting talent.
Says Uday Desai, director of the new IIT at Hyderabad: "If you create a research ambience smart people will join." The fledgling IITs and other institutions in India are now trying to blaze a new trail. Like Jain, their directors go on fund-raising trips to the US, hire industry veterans to teach students critical skills, break down barriers between departments and network intensely with their colleagues in other institutions.
You could also see them trying to woo outstanding Indian scientists working abroad. "Post-independence, till today, we have got scientists who wanted to come back for family or nationalistic reasons," says K Vijay Raghavan, director of the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore: "Now we need to attract those who are doing excellent science but have no strong reason to come back." Indian institutions need them for a reason: the country's research and educational establishment is undergoing its biggest expansion since the 1960s. If everything works out, Indian science could be looking at a paradigm shift.
India is now building eight new IITs, five science institutions like the IITs, six biology research institutes, and several research institutions in niche areas. This is apart from institutions that are being renamed and remodelled and universities that have been planned but not yet started. This expansion has doubled the public investments in R&D in the past five years and increased the output of Indian science. In the global country ranking for publications, India has moved up from 15th position in 2003 to 9th in 2010.
The number of science and engineering PhDs produced a year in India, at an abysmal level of 5,000 in 2003, has grown to over 9,000 in 2010. The government target is to generate over 20,000 science and engineering PhDs a year by 2020. Lack of sufficient number of PhD students is a reason for the poor research performance of IITs, whose best students always used to go abroad. "When we used to teach at IIT Mumbai in the 1990s," says Seshadri, now CEO of the Bangalore-based startup Boltel, "all of us had offers from the best universities in the US.
Science education and research in India undergoing a quiet but potentially huge transformation
His job is to build an IIT from scratch, as one of the eight new IITs the government is building. Jain has lofty aims: to build an institution that will be among the top 20 in the world in 50 years. As a beginning, he wants the IIT to break free from many selfimposed rules and assumptions.
Reimagining IITs
The IITs have long been known around the world for their teaching but they have a poor reputation for research. In a recent study of the top 20 engineering institutions in the world, Thomson Reuters found that the IITs had the lowest number of citations per paper between 1999 and 2009; they had 3.57 citations per paper compared to 10.50 for Stanford University, the highest for any engineering institution. The new IIT directors and some of the old ones are now bent upon changing the research culture in India, which is also a good way of attracting talent.
Says Uday Desai, director of the new IIT at Hyderabad: "If you create a research ambience smart people will join." The fledgling IITs and other institutions in India are now trying to blaze a new trail. Like Jain, their directors go on fund-raising trips to the US, hire industry veterans to teach students critical skills, break down barriers between departments and network intensely with their colleagues in other institutions.
You could also see them trying to woo outstanding Indian scientists working abroad. "Post-independence, till today, we have got scientists who wanted to come back for family or nationalistic reasons," says K Vijay Raghavan, director of the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore: "Now we need to attract those who are doing excellent science but have no strong reason to come back." Indian institutions need them for a reason: the country's research and educational establishment is undergoing its biggest expansion since the 1960s. If everything works out, Indian science could be looking at a paradigm shift.
India is now building eight new IITs, five science institutions like the IITs, six biology research institutes, and several research institutions in niche areas. This is apart from institutions that are being renamed and remodelled and universities that have been planned but not yet started. This expansion has doubled the public investments in R&D in the past five years and increased the output of Indian science. In the global country ranking for publications, India has moved up from 15th position in 2003 to 9th in 2010.
The number of science and engineering PhDs produced a year in India, at an abysmal level of 5,000 in 2003, has grown to over 9,000 in 2010. The government target is to generate over 20,000 science and engineering PhDs a year by 2020. Lack of sufficient number of PhD students is a reason for the poor research performance of IITs, whose best students always used to go abroad. "When we used to teach at IIT Mumbai in the 1990s," says Seshadri, now CEO of the Bangalore-based startup Boltel, "all of us had offers from the best universities in the US.
