Research courses in technology need to be relooked

Indian tech institutes need to look at leading global universities to get ideas for reshaping our research programmes and making them more lucrative

By M Sufyan Beg

In good Universities, postg raduate prog rams enjoy a higher preference than the undergraduate programmes. More specifically, the Ph.D programmes get precedence, followed by the Master’s programmes and then the Bachelor. With the best quality Ph.D. students, they can produce top quality research, their project funding increases, they are able to attract good faculty, etc. Their strength of good Master’s students not only provides them with a good starting point of research but also provides them with a good feeder for their Ph.D. programmes. The Bachelor’s programme, in fact, is usually taken as a liability. This is probably the reason that they charge maximum tuition fees from the Bachelor’s student and their scholarships are almost non-existent. There is better funding for the Master’s students and the maximum funding for the Ph.D. students. Apart from the tuition fee waiver, they are offered substantial maintenance allowance in the form of Teaching or Research Assistantships, Scholarships and even Fellowships.

Unfortunately, it is just the other way round. At most institutes, the Bachelor’s programme is the flagship programme. We get the best quality students there. The topmost layer then go to take up lucrative jobs after graduation. Those who are not able to get a job take up the Master’s program. Very few good students opt for the Master’s programme by their choice. By the time these Master’s students complete their degrees, they are able to get good jobs themselves. It is only the scum that gets into the Ph.D. The exceptions are very few. Obviously, the research suffers badly.

The above-mentioned mind-set stems from the fact that most of the Indian industries treat the Ph.D. holders as over-qualified and hence, too narrow for their job.We have to understand that Ph.D. is not about doing research, it is about learning how to do research. So, more than the education that one acquires during a programme, it is the training which is important. That way, we have to treat the Ph.D. holders as the better-trained ones than the Master’s degree holders. Likewise, the Master’s degree holders are the better-trained ones than the Bachelor’s degree holders. The good companies do keep this in mind. Therein, while a Bachelor’s degree holder may get a position of Graduate Trainee, the Master’s degree holder may get the position of a Senior Engineer directly.

An average student may prefer to go for the Graduate Trainee position immediately after their Bachelor’s and get promoted to the Senior Engineer’s position after gaining the experience of two years. The good students, on the other hand, will be encouraged to invest those two years for the Master’s programme and get the Senior Engineer’s position directly, with the additiona l Master’s degree in their Re - sume. This trend reversal will see a seachange in the quality of the Master’s students. A similar practice should be followed in the Master’s programme vis-à-vis the Ph.D. programme, in order to boost the prospects of the latter. It may be to trigger the onset of this trend reversal that the M.S.(R) programme may have been launched at many IITs. This Master’s by Research program was meant to attract better students into it, as compared to the conventional M.Tech. programme. With an increased research component in M.S.(R), the interest in continuing for Ph.D. was expected to go up. However, the plan s e e m s to have failed. Only those students who could not qualify on merit for the M.Tech. programme, started taking admission in M.S.(R). Other experiments have been to go for an Integrated M.Tech. programme. The students could go on to get the additional M.Tech. degree after 5 years, thus saving a year from B.Tech. plus M.Tech. path. Likewise, the direct Ph.D. admissions after B.Tech. has been devised to get the good students continue for research.

However, both these again did not find favour with the students. They prefer to go for B.Tech. or M.Tech. The integrated programs are taken up only by the left out lot of students. Very clearly, this does not augur well for the cause of research in the Indian technical institutions. A case, for instance, is that of IISc and JNU. Both are primarily postgraduate institutions and they do not have Bachelor’s degrees. They come top in ranking almost always. The rest of the institutions have their energies sapped in catering to the undergraduate programmes. Over there, the dilemma with the Faculty Members is that they get paid for teaching but get promoted for research. They can’t focus on either. At postgrad