Data claims that “Professors” in the USA are among the highest income earning groups. Indian professors on the other hand have to take a hunger strike route to awaken the government to revise their salaries which are still nothing compared to the students they produce out of the institutions. This to me is alarming.

One of the most impressive stuff that happens at the US universities is that a lot of research oriented projects actually are carried out in the university campuses. A lot of entrepreneurs come out from the university campuses. Look at the following research page from Stanford. By googling the same keyword and changing the name from stanford to IITB, I got one of the relavant link as the follows, “Research IITB“. I would want the readers of this post to take the decision on the research pages from both the esteemed institutes.

Look at the following links at stanford

Funding Links

Funding Database

I again changed the word “stanford” to “IITB” in my search query. Look at the results of the search query.

Google Query Results

(If you are unable to get correct results through this link, type “corporate research funds to IITB” in the google search box)

You might be wondering, why all this data and what are we trying to prove. Also why this on the Indian heritage blog ?

The point I am trying to prove is pretty simple. One of the best ways quality education can revive in this country is making sure that there is an industry academician sync and a lot of research work has to be outsourced to the educational institutes rather than the corporates spending significant money in development and maintainance of their own R&D centers.

The advantage with the educational institutes is that they have a talented, highly energetic pool of brilliant human resources who are thriving to work on challenges (I believe there cannot be more energy and passion in individuals to try challenging and different things than at the college levels). They have adequate (if not enough) amount of logistics which is readily available. They have significant amount of time which can be utilized for research activities.

The possible dis-advantages that I can think of might be that the educational institutes today might not be geared to take up everything immediately. But one can always start small and then grow. One more issue might be commitment, but that I believe might get resolved by performance based rewards.

In my personal opinion if we start doing this there will be a lot more talented crowd which will look at education as a very lucrative profession (which I believe is not the case today) and the quality of education will definitely boost many folds.

One more curios question that may arise in the readers mind, Why such a post on Indian Heritage. Here’s the justification.

From what I know, the system of conducting research at the educational institutes was never new to India. I might not be wrong (although there are no concrete proofs that I have on this) in quoting that the philosophy of research at educational institutes was in fact born from the Indian educational set-up.

India in the ancient days, had a Gurukul system of education. The Guru’s use to own the ashram and the students who need education have to enroll in the ashram and get vidya at the ashram. The Guru ,if you remember watching all the mythological serials and other reading material, would be the main person in the “Raj-Darbar” who the King will look upon for all the solutions which require intellect intervention. Be it proposing a diplomatic solution with the neighbor, or information regarding a medicine for a particular disease (remember sanjivini in ramayan), or information regarding a new weapon or “mantra” for success.

In my personal opinion its high time for us to recollect our past memories, learn from our mistake, leverage the power of educational institutes that we have today and make sure that they help the nation in building the next level of quality educational institutes.

Tags: education, educational institutes, guru, gurukul, IITB, India, research, stanford