why do we attach "problems" with "population"

Sandeep Nagar
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While preparing for my interview for Indian Air Force, one of my trainer asked me in a mock interview, "How do you propose to solve the problem of large Indian population". I answered that ,"Its not a problem, its a potential opportunity. It has become a problem due to mismanagement of large human resource"

And its still true after 6 years. No doubt i never cleared that interview!(just joking)

India has the largest pool of human resources for any business you can think of. For as low as 10 vacancies, you find a few thousand applications. Government needed to concentrate on creating opportunities. Instead, they restricted them by their laws.

Any rational man can identify India as a hub for Asian market. If you do business in India, you can do all over Asia. Its better connected by air, water and land to almost every country than any of its counterparts. Moreover, you will never need to look out for recruiting people. Marketing skilled labor can be one of the major attraction to boost Indian economy. Moreover India has better relations with Europe, Africa and America than its counterparts which can be encashed if we provide proper infrastructure to upcoming industries.

If everything is obvious, why don't we do it. Because we are Irrational. We are ready to kill each other for an unknown entity (GOD) when provoked by brainless maniacs but we wont stand for our right as a citizen. Intellectual class like to see everything as problem. I use to see NDTV "big fight" when i was in India, and it surprised me that most of the time, commentator use to just state problems while replying for questions (of course related to a problem!). They discussed problems. They rarely discussed Solutions.

I identify a country by its state of mind. By those standards Indian state of mind is to associate everything with the word "problem". Instead if we would try to work out solutions, it can emerge as one of the fastest growing nation since we have almost every natural resource that this growth would demand.

sorry state of research in India !

I am an ex-PhD student from India and i finally decided to write something about the way India approaches the field of research.

I wonder how many people give a serious thought about the fact that we are a premier country to supply scientific human resource to developing countries and we still are so backwards when it comes to scientific research.

We took 23 years (1984-2007) to make an aircraft (LCA) when aviation just completed its first century and that too by assembling foreign parts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_Tejas). We always get second-hand accomplishments when it comes to semiconductor technology. We still lack state-of-the-art fab (fabrication unit for electronic chips) in this country (http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=503240). When world is moving forward towards 45nm technology, we are struggling to get 130nm technology and that too IMPORTED. We manage world's biggest software industry but when it comes to making a big adventure into software research, our companies shy away from that. We still count upon CV Raman, Chandrashekhar and Hargobind Khurana to get Nobel prize for their research and two of them did their work outside India. Open up any volume no. of scientific journal and you would find at least 10 articles with Indian names but very few from Indian Institutes. 12% doctors in USA and 36% of NASA scientists are born in India (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/2853178.cms). We rarely see a headline which says that this act was performed first time in the world by an Indian in India, whereas its so common abroad. Indian Research Journals have such low impact factor ratings that even Indian scientist don't want to publish their research here(http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/dec102000/1513.pdf). Two Indian Journals crossed the mark of 1.00 impact factor in 2004 when we have when we have journals with impact factors crossing 50.

When one has to counter such statement, they have few ready-made names to count upon. Names who actually fought anti-research environment and did good job. If one closely studies the success stories then one can easily find that system never contributed in a positive way. Dr. Abdul Kalam's autobiography is a shining proof.

Let me illustrate what i mean by anti-research environment. The field of research is based purely on creativity and innovation. One has to be innovative to see whats new and then to create that into a product. For PhD s, its the thesis. Everything depends on your approach. First you seek someone who already knows much about the subject (an animal we call "guide" , as if we are sheep!) to know about the subject. He can illustrate you "what has already been done". Then its your job to find a new phenomenon in that subject which has not been discovered.

The very first mistake is usually done here. They depend too much on Guide. They expect him to do things for them. This is partially an outcome of spoon-feeding educational system. Anyway, now guide provides this service most of the time, but every service has a cost. This cost comes up in for of "submission of self-esteem". You do whatever (s)he says. Unfortunately we have a whole generation of guides who did the same when they were PhD students and hence its obvious to justify their own actions in wake of their inner call. Once you submit yourself, you loose the creative abilities.

Up till now, i discussed everything at an individual level. Coming to national level, most of the projects are alloted on basis of contacts rather than actual scientific abilities. All interviews and presentations are staged bullshit. All recruitments are staged bullshit. These statements comes from personal experiences. Everybody in scientific community knows this and uses it without saying a word.

One needs to have "good contacts" in order to get a project. It doesn't matter whether you have shown any capability which is required. My Indian PhD project was alloted to a my guide, who knew nothing around the central idea of project. He use to come to me for preparing his presentations!

"Butt-licking" is one of the most favorite way to do PhD work if you know nothing. If guide demands to run a DC motor with an AC current, butt-lickers would run to make these connections. Majority of PhD students in universities cannot clear the basic examination for lectureship (National Eligibility Test). Amongst them, most of them have taken admission in PhD program because they had nothing else to do after completing their masters.

And what do you get, if you refuse to do all this. My scholarship was "somehow" delayed for a while YEAR. I had to wait for an year to make experiment on an instrument, since the man who handles the equipment didn't had "good relations" with my guide. My friend (who follows the same) has to do a court case to get signatures for his Final Viva session to be held in department after submitting his thesis around one and half years ago.

All these cases which i told you in above paragraph belongs to those people who has cleared a national level examination and claimed national scholarship.

Now what do you expect us to do in India. We seek some other lab. Surprisingly, its mostly outside India. Readers will not find it hard to reason out why!

Present status of research needs to be improved. In last few years, thanks to a scientist president, Government has increased the inflow of money in research. But this has to be managed properly and in a professional way (Deadlines should be dead-lines. Extending a deadlines does not justifies its name). India needs to change age old higher education policy and introduce more do-and-learn themes rather than rote-and-learn theme for educating youth. Also, it must be wisely understood that research is a kind of investment for future progress. Indian media should also highlight Indian achievement just as they do petty criminal cases or political scandals 24X7. Media has to show much mature outlook towards researchers as they are the backbone of scientific progress. With a huge population, India can become self sufficient if it choose to. Mis-management of human resource should be killed and efficiency should be the basis of making government policies.

I believe that private sector is the key to improve research situation. Private sector can develop a competitive research community as proved by foreign companies like IBM, Intel, AMD and others. This has worked well for the field of biotechnology. It can work for every field.

I hope that reader will understand that this article was written with clear intentions to portray the challenges ahead. We can do better if we rationalize our approach as we did in our golden era.

Author is pursuing PhD at Sweden finally...