Interview of Prof. P. K Burma on the issue of “Factors affecting Education and Research in India”

What is your take on elementary education in India? how do you compare it with the elementary education at your time and current?

Education in general and specially elementary education is focusing more on marks now a days and basically how much you score and other things. That was not there when we were students, way back in 70’s.

At that point of time, the kind of pressure that now exists for scoring high marks was not there and other thing I have seen is in order to score high marks, too much of tuition is happening, for every subject you have tutors and this is where we are losing child’s complete growth in more wider way.

In earlier days, co-curricular activities mixed with class teaching was there and this allowed children to explore and learn more while doing everything on their own.

How do you see the influence of coaching institutions on our education system in current scenario?

From science point of view, in education, the experimental work or hands on learning is lost and this is worrisome. It is very rare that we see schools giving children this kind of exposure. Most of the schools or learning systems fail to give experimental exposure to children. Coaching adds on to this problem where students instead of being in regular schools move on to coaching institutes at an early age to crack various examinations.

The main aim of the coaching institute is to make students crack an exam and in doing so they don’t put the students on the track of horizontal concepts or you can say more extensive understanding of the concept.

The coaching institutes don’t have the time to build up the whole story to make students understand the reason behind nor do they have intentions to tell how things happen and what is the use of it. They just give you a capsule and that’s where the whole problem lies. We don’t allow students to expand themselves in horizontal way (by grasping concepts).

At times many of them are not strong in their fundamentals and have just been taught to solve the problem without understanding the concept and their approach is just to crack the exam. But that’s not how the education goes.

They mould you in such a way that you just keep solving the problems, answering MCQs to crack an exam and forget about any concept aspect of it.

Children don’t even write on their own now, they are also being taught to write in a specific way so that they can score well.

How do you see the exam system? do you think it’s the best way to judge or understand the capability of a student?

End term/mid-term exam is not the best way of judging any student but we don’t have any options. For higher education we have very less time for internal assessment . Every child needs to be assessed in a different way, but we don’t invest that much time in assessing a student. It is because the student-teacher ratio is highly skewed. At school level, we can see that a specific subject teacher is not only handling different subjects, but also involved in various kinds of school activities which take away a lot of their time

On the contrary the system should provide more infrastructure to assess the students. Students are getting punished because of this flaw of education system. Kids are losing out on subjective writing and thinking skills because of an objective-type-only kind of assessment.

Even in NET exam we used to have objective and subjective papers, but now it has all been made into MCQs which at times does not allow proper assessment of the students.

Open book exam is an excellent idea to get around this problem but making a paper for open book exam is the most difficult thing to do.

The bachelorette school also gives flexibility to write the way the student wants. This helps to enhance the writing skills of the students.

RTIs and court cases also add to the burden of assessment.

How university system is different from IITs and IISERs, specially when it comes to pure science?

I think director has more power in IITs AND IISERs and can act independently whereas at university system we have a lot of administrative barriers. IITs and IISERs have very less number of students compared to universities or you can say that the student to teacher ratio is fairly good compared to our university system.

They have lesser administrative barriers and we have just one thing — barriers.

Policy makers come up with new universities or institutes but do not invest in strengthening or developing existing universities or departments. Most of the development you see in the university is because of initiatives of few VC’s/ administrators/ faculties and their will to go out of the way to work and finally establish something useful for the university and of course for us (professors) and students.

For example at Delhi University Prof. Deepak Pental was the one of them who took initiative and made some striking changes when he was at the helm of affairs. He was instrumental in setting up different facilities, strengthening the science laboratories in colleges, supporting research by faculty of the university by creating R&D grants etc. These are just a few examples.

There are allegations of partiality during fund distribution by different funding agencies? do you think its correct?

To a certain extent partiality allegations may be correct but not always. Let me take you deeper into the matter to let you understand what actually happens most of the time.

Every project has to be reviewed by experts in the field. It is increasingly becoming difficult to get reviewers who will give their inputs in time. In many cases the reviews are not properly done and the main onus then lies on the members of the task forces for selection of projects, which can then possibly lead to biases. If you see reviews of projects done at the international level they give logical reasoning for every point possible for the rejection or acceptance of the project and not only this helps the committee to select or reject the project but it also helps the person who submitted the project to understand why it has been rejected, so that he can improve. But in our case, hardly anyone knows why the project has been rejected. I feel rather than just putting allegations we should all introspect that all of us somewhere contribute to this by not doing the assigned job properly.

Also Read: Kids most affected by the fragile primary education system in India

Of course labs/institutes which are already doing well or publishing well will have better chances of being funded further. I personally believe that in India we should also consider few more things while awarding or rejecting the project, like if a person has done reasonably well in places which lack facilities which is very common in universities the person should be supported even if his track record may not be as good as those who are in places with excellent facilities. I mean we should take various factors into account before selecting or rejecting the project.

In this regard, I feel internal funding has a big role in research. This helps to nurture the research of a new faculty or scientist. It takes few years for him/her to set up proper facilities and to do some preliminary work which will help him to compete for larger fundings. In university usually the first grant is written to establish a lab. In short, surely some of the project funding may not have been done correctly but in general the allegation of partiality is not correct in a large scale.

Do you think that in university system we have created categories? why do we need categories in universities despite the fact that all universities have the same eligibility condition for the recruitment?

Yes definitely we have lots of categories in universities despite the fact that we have the same recruitment policy and conditions and why to talk about universities only, we have categorization of education since very beginning. We don’t need different categories of universities instead we need facilities and regulations and good heads who can take decisions and I think that will help us to overcome the problem.

Do you think, political influence is increasing day by day in education? if yes then what harm is it causing to the education and research?

In short and concise terms, yes surely it is increasing and it is definitely not taking us in the right direction that I can say for sure.

Do you think IITs and IISERs are getting more funding in research whereas university system get very less funding? despite the fact that for most of the universities, mandate is to do research in basic science also?

See, the reason for creating IISERs was to have pure science education and research but this also tells another story. Somewhere down the line, the government has accepted that problems in university system do exist and instead of rectifying it or probably thinking that rectifying will cost more the authority has come up with the solution of creating new institutions and it’s always easier to create new institutions instead of rectifying the problems in existing ones

But the fact of the matter is 70 years down the line if we don’t take care of our universities or other institutions and we keep opening the new institutions without ensuring that the new one doesn’t fall the same way. It is not worth and the problem we are facing will remain unsolved.

Yes IISERs have excellent funding as they are new institutions but had the same amount of funding been infused in our existing system and had they rectified the problems then I can challenge that our faculty could have achieved the best results and must have produced good products as other renowned institutions are producing. But for that to happen we need infrastructure, funding etc.

Why are we lagging in research despite the fact that we are hiring post doc students now a days?

Yes it is correct. The reason is not complicated and I have been talking about it earlier also and so many times I spoke about it at different forums — we need funding and facilities.

See the IISERs have all the required facilities and importantly they have facilities according to number of students. We are lacking in basic facilities and there are equal expectations from us . Now it is becoming very difficult to meet the expectations of the department and of the students because administrators hardly understand our problems.

The new faculty who is joining needs fund, equipment and some other basic things which we have to give to them. They borrow chemicals, furniture and other stuff to start the research but how long can they borrow? How long can anyone help him/her in funding? These are some of the real questions we are fighting on a day to day basis.

The working hand of any faculty in research are their students. Now you tell me some of our students (Ph.D as well as M.Sc) are travelling almost 40 km daily in commute to and from the lab. If you transform this travelling distance to the time (for work) then it would be around 2 to 3 hours minimum.

How can I expect my students to work in lab till 7 at night? How can i expect the best out of him/her? I really appreciate the students who are working so hard and managing good results in research despite all odds but this is surely not at all close to any ideal conditions if at all we need to have good research for our country then we desperately need to improve these conditions,.

The simple answer to this is having sufficient hostels on campus, I think we need hostels in every university campus, so that the student can spend more time on his research work and studies. We don’t have sufficient hostels and have been demanding the hostel for so many years but still it’s not there for most of the students and specially for girls. All IISERs have residential campuses. These are simple solutions but we need these solutions fast.

Tell me more about achievements of your department in south campus or any other department you are aware of?

Our department is doing good. The group of Prof. Pental from our department have developed transgenics in mustard for hybrid seeds which has been approved by, and now needs a nod from the government. I was also a part of this team. It is now up to the political will whether they want to use it for the country or not.

Prof Thelma headed a project that screened 2,00,000 new born kids for 45 common and rare genetic disorders, probably a first in the country. She was the one who also set up a lab for molecular identification of Fragile X Syndrome which has helped a large number of patients. These are examples of work which normally should have happened in institutes of ICAR or ICMR. But you see this type of work is carried out in universities.

All of them got the resources on their own and ran door to door of different funding agencies to do such projects. Even if you have nice leads, you still have to run after them. You need to remember that it is their own individual hardwork. You can’t expect every time that people are running after funding agencies to fund their new ideas to benefit the society and country. It is for the system to check that no such opportunities are lost and help faculties or researcher to achieve the best so that it can be used for the best of our nation.

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