Research fails to keep pace

Hyderabad: In spite of the steady increase in the budgetary allocation for research in the country the productivity of research organisations doesn’t seem to have increased.

Many premier CSIR labs, including those from Hyderabad like the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) and the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT), have registered a decline in the quality of scientific results.

A recent study found that the productivity of CCMB and IICT had fallen by 51 per cent and 74 per cent respectively in the last five years. On the other hand, the National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI) has registered an increase in productivity.

The study was conducted by another CSIR laboratory, the National Institute for Interdisciplinary Science and Technology (NIIST) based in Thiruvanantha-puram, which surprisingly found itself to be in decline too.

The study linked the quantity of research with quality as per a formula to calculate productivity. These two parameters were compared against that of top ranking institutions like the Broad Institute of MIT, Harvard University and Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. “First, we look at the quantity.

This is the number of articles published during a five-year period. The second dimension is quality,” Dr Gangan Prathap, scientist, NIIST, wrote in the study. Quality is measured by checking the number of research papers of an institution that are in the top 10 per cent of most cited works by other scientists.

The study found that quantity and quality had fallen by 51 per cent in the last five years. The CCMB registered a staggering 74 per cent fall. NGRI improved by nearly 11 per cent. Dr Mohan Rao, director, CCMB, said, “I don't know what parameters the study used to calculate productivity. But our publications have increased by 30 per cent in three years. It is true of IICT also.”

Some former scientists, however, say that Indian institutions lose out on the quality factor as there is increased stress on just output and not the quality of output. Dr K. Babu Rao, former chief scientist, IICT, said, "There is no applied research these days. Everybody goes only by the number of research papers.

There is hardly any industrial research in CSIR laboratories. The government also doesn't care about CSIR anymore." The CSIR, as a whole, was found to have declined by 42 per cent in productivity. Eleven of the 18 CSIR laboratories were found to have negative productivity.