Tag Archives: India

India’s research scholars in protest mode

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The meagre fellowships that India’s science scholars get has been a contentious issue for long. It raised its head again this week when hundreds of research scholars from various government science and medical institutes of New Delhi staged a silent protest in the corridors of power demanding an immediate hike in fellowships to tackle inflation blues. They were assured by the Indian government yesterday that their long-standing demands will be heard in a meeting next protestweek. And some positive action is expected within the next two weeks.

The researchers under the banner of ‘Research Scholars of India’ were protesting in front of the office of secretary of India’s Department of Science and Technology K. VijayRaghavan. These were scholars from many institutes of Delhi — All India Institute of Medical Sciences, National Institute of Immunology, International Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB), Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jamia Hamdard University, Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi University and National Institute of Plant Genome Research. Their immediate demands:  a hike in fellowship to compensate for the current inflation rate, annual increments linked to inflation, revision of fellowships from April 1, 2014 and streamlining of monthly fellowships.

Says ICGEB junior research fellow Krishnan Yadav, “Fellowships or stipends provided by the Indian Government to research scholars have, historically, been abysmally low. The amount disbursed is probably enough for one person in his/her twenties to afford a roof over their heads.”

According to a release by the researchers’ body, the cost of living has skyrocketed with inflation soaring over 144% as compared to 2010 level.  A junior research fellow (JRF) gets a stipend of Rs. 16000 per month, increased from Rs. 12000 in 2010 after an indefinite fast by students of Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. Senior research  fellows (SRFs) get around Rs. 18,000 per month. Research associates (PhD graduates) get a consolidated fellowship of around Rs. 22,000 per month. “Average age of a research associate is 31 years. With this kind of money, we can’t even support our parents and marriage is a distant dream,” Yadav says.

The protestors are demanding that the pay be revised to 35,000 for JRFs and Rs 38,000 for SRFs.

Quoting a CSIR study, the disgruntled researchers say around 44% of fellows who qualify the prestigious CSIR-UGC JRF/NET examination don’t join Indian institutions for a PhD. More than half of them look at a PhD abroad mainly because of the poor pay.

Anjali Khatri of ICGEB put out an update on the protestors’ Facebook page saying the DST had assured them that new fellowship amounts will be proposed considering inflation rates and guidelines of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). The protestors  have demanded that their annual increment be linked to two factors — inflation and pay commision. The pay commision recommendations come into force every year but a Phd student’s tenure is not that long. So the researchers have proposed that 1/10th of the hike of pay commision should be included every year in the felllowships along with an inflation-adjusted hike as done for any other government employee.

There have been similar protests in the science hub of the country Bengaluru and in Chandigrah. Some more protests are planned in Mumbai.

Here’s hoping the demands of this country’s young researchers are heard by her policy makers. It will certainly go a long way in retaining talent and attracting more students to science — issues that have plagued the growth of science in the country for long.

Nature India announces its first photo contest

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NI photo contestOn popular demand from readers, Nature India is pleased to announce its first ever photo contest!

One lucky winner chosen by the Nature India editorial and design team will be featured on Nature India. The winning entry stands a chance of being on the cover of one of our forthcoming print publications. The winner and two runners-up will receive a copy of the Nature India Special Annual volume and a bag of goodies from the Nature Publishing Group.

The theme for our inaugural photo competition is: Science & technology in India.

The contest is open to everyone – any nationality, any age, any profession. The only keywords for the subject of the picture are: ‘India’ and ‘science’. You could use whatever camera you wish to – even your cell phone – as long as the photograph you send us is unedited, original and in a digital format. Photographs will be judged for novelty, creativity and quality.

Please send a single entry to npgindia@nature.com  with your name, telephone number and address, both e-mail and postal. Please mention “Nature India Photo Contest” in the subject line of your email. The photograph must be accompanied by a brief caption (not exceeding 100 words) explaining the subject of the picture along with the date, time and place it was taken. The last date for submissions is August 15, 2014. If you are on social media, please use the hashtag #NatureIndphoto to spread the word around about the contest.

Selfies are welcome as are pictures of sculptures, statues, paintings, and other works of art. Just make sure you are not violating any copyrights. Also, no obscene, provocative, defamatory, sexually explicit, or other inappropriate content please.

So, get set and go clickety-click!

Key to suicide prevention may lie in subgroup analysis

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If efforts to prevent suicide—a cause of death that takes nearly 1 million lives each year worldwide—are going to be effective, experts may have to look beneath national rates.

Country averages belie the fact that suicide rates often vary widely among socioeconomic and regional subgroups. That revelation comes from an expansive collection of articles, published yesterday in the Lancet, some of which dig into decades worth of data for a deeper understanding of what they call a badly understood, underreported problem.

In Australia, for example, as the nationwide suicide rate fell from 40 per 100,000 in 1997 and 1998, to 20 per 100,000 in 2003, it was rising among young men living in rural and isolated areas, Alexandra Pitman, a population health scientist at University College London, and her colleagues point out in their paper. “If you just looked at the national rates, you would be ignoring a big problem,” she says. “Such complexity in national and international patterns,” Pitman adds, means that “each country is forced to take a fine-grained approach to preventing [suicide].”

A similar urban-rural discrepancy occurred in India, according to a study lead by Prabhat Jha, a public health researcher at the University of Toronto, Canada. During 2010, the rate of suicide in rural areas was 20.4 per 100,000, nearly twice that seen in cities, a rate of 12.0 per 100,000. The paper suggests that the higher suicide rates seen in rural India than more urbanized parts of the country is in part due to greater access to pesticides, which are used in some suicide attempts. “Urgent research is needed to explore the reasons for suicide in young people and the large regional variations seen in this study,” the paper concludes.

The need for prevention may be particularly important given the dearth of psychiatric drugs and other treatments for suicide prevention, and the difficulty of arranging clinical drug trials for suicidal people, a topic explored in depth in a recent news feature in Nature Medicine.

Image courtesy of James Steidl via Shutterstock. 

Being a Scientist in India

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To supplement this month’s SoNYC discussion, on Of Schemes and Memes we have been delving into the world of minority scientists. Our first installment from Jeanne Garbarino, a Postdoc at Rockefeller University, considered some of the underrepresented groups within science. In our second instalment, Mónica I. Feliú-Mójer discussed her role as the vice-director of Ciencia Puerto Rico, a non-profit, grassroots organization that promotes science, research and scientific literacy in Puerto Rico. In our next post we will hear from Subhra Priyadarshini, an award winning science journalist and the editor of Nature Publishing Group’s India portal Nature India and manager of the Nature India blog, Indigenus. She talks about life for scientists in India.

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Subhra has been chasing deadlines to cover politics and sports, fashion and films, crime and natural disasters in the mainstream Indian media for around 15 years. She finally chose to come back to her first love – science – in 2007 launching the India portal of NPG one year later. She has been a correspondent with major Indian dailies and briefly worked for the Observer in London. Subhra received the BBC World Service Trust award for her coverage of the ‘vanishing islands of Sunderbans’ in the Bay of Bengal in 2006. She is a regular contributor to BBC Radio’s Hindi science programme ‘Vigyan aur Vikas’ (Science and Development). She has been on the panel of many international conferences on science communication and won acclaim in India for her coverage of the Orissa super cyclone in 1999 and the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004.

These are boom times for Indian science. The national spending on science and technology has gone up in the last five years and is inching towards two per cent of India’s GDP. Hordes of new institutes are coming up in the nook and corner of the country — 30 new central universities, 5 new Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, 8 new Indian Institutes of Technology and 20 new Indian Institutes of Information Technology are in various stages of conception and completion.

However, many people are of the view that simply increasing the number of institutes will not lead to better scientific prowess. The education system needs a complete rethink in order to attract more students to science and produce world class scientists.

According to a government estimate, India has registered an annual growth rate of more than 12% in scientific publications in Science Citation Indexed journals during the last five years which compares well to a global average of 4%. India’s global ranking in the number of publications also saw relative improvement — from 15th position in 2000 to 10th in 2009.

Given the background, it should look like it is really hunky-dory for scientists working in India. Though good science and research are happening in some brilliant pockets of India, things are not as cheerful in a majority of labs. The lion’s share of scientific R&D in India is government controlled. The pet peeves of a lot of scientists stem from the bureaucratic handling of science — poor pay and personal development opportunities, lack of amenities and stifling work environments where new ideas are not allowed to flow freely.

India is also accused of doing a lot of ‘copycat science’ duplicating work already done in western countries. The Prime Minister of India Manmohan Singh actually urged scientists at the largest meeting of scientists – the Indian Science Congress in January 2011 – to think out of the box and ahead of the times. India hasn’t seen a home-grown Nobel Laureate since Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, who got the prize for physics in 1930, and that is something the government rues time and again at scientific meetings.

A lot of brilliant scientists work in labs away from their country and the government has launched new schemes to bring them back home. New programmes and incentives have also been announced for post-docs to carry out their PhD work in Indian labs. At the moment the fad is to fetch a PhD from a good foreign lab or under a Nobel Laureate mentor – that gives them an edge in the job market.

Also, the ‘publish or perish’ principle of scientific success results in a lot of junior scientists complaining that their seniors take credit for their work and fail to acknowledge their scientific contribution. A lot of angry voices in the Nature India forum complain about corruption and one-upmanship in Indian labs. While a handful of such cases have been taken seriously and scientists/administrators found guilty removed from their positions, there is no empirical data to prove that this might be a widespread phenomenon.

Like elsewhere, women scientists in India have their set of problems – mostly stemming from societal pressures that force them to multi-task – not allowing them and their research to grow at par with their male colleagues. The government, however, has launched some schemes that would go a distance and bringing women back to the labs. More on the issues women scientists face in India can be found in these Nature India forum discussions here and here..

‘Brain circulation’ and other trends in global science

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Forget ‘brain drain’ – many countries are now focusing their efforts on making the most of ‘brain circulation’, according to a new report on global science from the Royal Society, Britain’s national academy of science.

In a shift away from attempting to stem the flow of talented scientists overseas, countries such as China and India are setting aside resources to attract native scientists back home later in their careers while maintaining their links with host countries.

Many nomadic scientists who remain overseas are also keen to maintain links with their home countries but are unsure where to start, making them an “untapped resource” for international collaboration, according to the report, Knowledge, Networks and Nations: Global Scientific Collaboration in the 21st Century.

Where brain drain is still a major problem, such as in Africa, governments need to reward talented scientists and enable them to foster global networks while ensuring they also help build national research capacity.

Other highlights of the report include:

• International collaboration is growing, and has a significant effect on a research paper’s impact (see ‘Research sans frontières’ for more)

• In addition to the meteoric rise of China and, to a lesser extent, Brazil and India, other rapidly emerging scientific nations include Turkey, Iran and Tunisia

• R&D investment in developing countries is increasing: the share of foreign-owned business R&D in the developing world grew from 2% in 1996 to 18% in 2002

• Regions and cities are displacing countries as the relevant unit when discussing R&D – in the United States, the state of California accounted for more than one-fifth of national R&D spending in 2004, while Moscow accounts for 50% of Russian research articles

• Many established research centres and funders have become global brands that are no longer necessarily confined to their geographic location – the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom has a campus in China, for example, while the UK-based Wellcome Trust helps fund institutes in Asia and Africa

What’s your reaction to the report? If you’re a scientist working overseas, do you plan to return home later in your career? Are you seeing the benefits of international collaboration? Share your thoughts below.