Excerpts from an article by Prof. Jayant V. Narlikar:
A few months ago the finance minister announced a grant of Rs 100 crore to the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, to help it raise its standards to the levels of Oxford and Cambridge....How about offering a large sum to the Board of Control for Cricket in India to generate a cricket team comparable to Bradman's 1948 Australian team? Or to Sahitya Akademi to produce another Indian Nobel laureate in literature? To get to where Cambridge and Oxford are, we could learn a thing or two from them....In my batch there was an undergraduate who wrote a paper in the Physical Review Letters, pointing out a serious error in an experiment performed in the UK to verify a prediction of Einstein's gravitation theory. The student went on to get a Nobel Prize based on his research work as a graduate student. His name is Brian Josephson.....Good students are attracted by good teachers and researchers....To learn the subject from those who made important research contributions to it can be very inspiring to a student....[Hoyle said] that teaching was complementary to research and that if we did not teach undergraduates, we would not attract good students to research. This explains why we are still a long way off from Oxbridge. We have two streams in our educational-cum-research system — universities and research institutes. In universities, teachers are overloaded with teaching duties with research taking a back seat. In national laboratories and research institutes, the research facilities are fine, but there are no undergraduates, not even students for a masters' degree. A typical research scientist believes he will do research alone and that teaching students is a distraction....Our undergraduates fall between two stools, between professors who do not teach and professors who do no research. We lose motivated students who could be attracted to academia....What is needed for our progress towards Oxbridge is a new set of rules that enable teaching and research to go hand in hand, with no compromise on merit, whether for faculty or for students. To achieve this, Rs 100 crore is neither necessary nor sufficient.
1 comment:
Nice write up by the prof. To add my 2 cent there,
I see this trend that the undergrad students from top universities in India go abroad for higher studies...One way to raise the standard of the institute will be to retain cream de la cream to do research in India...To do this the gates of IISc should open for undergrad students (the gate which was closed once)
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