Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): Lack of adequate resources and incentives; time-scale promotions of university faculty and less emphasis on rigorous procedures are some of the factors affecting the quality of research in India, says Uma Shankar Pandey.
Pandey, an Indian Ambassador of IAMCR (The International Association for Media and Communication Research), was talking with Free Press on the sidelines of a training workshop on ‘Data Journalism’ at Makhanlal University National University of Journalism and Communication in the city on Thursday.
Pandey, who also heads the Journalism Department of a Kolkata college, said that the situation on the research front is improving with all doctoral theses being mandatorily uploaded on ShodhGanga and subjected to plagiarism check. But it will take our universities some time to come on a par with Western, especially American universities, as far as research quality is concerned, he said.
When asked why Indian universities are at the bottom of international rankings, he said that many factors were responsible for it. “One of the reasons is that Indian research works are not cited by our own scholars. And citation index is one of the key factors in deciding any university’s rankings,” he said.
Moreover, he said research standards are higher and are applied rigorously in Western universities. “For instance, questionnaires have to be compulsorily subjected to pre- and pilot tests and scaling techniques have to be carefully applied,” he said.
Pandey said that in Indian universities, teachers are promoted to the next rank after working for a certain number of years. “In Western universities, on the other hand, promotions depend on the quality of research work,” he said.
About New Education Policy (NEP), he said that it seeks to demolish the wall separating vocational and academic education and promotes multidisciplinary studies. “Both these steps will promote better quality research in our institutions of higher learning,” he said.
Pandey said, however, much would depend on how the new policy is implemented.
