Empowering Science: NEP And Ethical Awareness Propel India's Research Landscape

What would you say about the impetus being given to pure sciences in the country?

Right now, we do need to invest more in education in pure sciences and basic sciences, because that gives us a foundation for anything to do. So that also helps us to ask daring questions and also to find out what is of interest to us and take it forward. If we talk about STEM education - science, technology, engineering, mathematics and if we want to use all of this in project mode, we need management. And if we want to look at even collaboration between nations, we need international collaboration, lawyers, etc. So it gives us a purpose. It helps us identify - where we want to go, what we want to do and why we want to do. So anything we want to do - banking, finance, everything - it requires an analytical mind.
And also at the juncture where we can't move forward, we should find out whether we are asking the right question out there. STEM education gives strength and resilience. So funding and supporting basic education is extremely important. Basic sciences is very important.

 

Typically, students have been taking up sciences at the school level. That has been the preferred option. But would you say that the student base that comes out of our schooling is ready for the kind of pure sciences courses that higher education offers? And what is their attitude towards sciences?

If we look at the Indian education system, the curriculum is quite heavy in the lower class levels. And if we look at the US education system, it's slightly the opposite because they become heavy later and are lighter earlier. But we are heavily loaded in the front. And this has got two implications. One, people who can do it can actually barge ahead and do a lot of things. But then people who take time to understand and move ahead, get slowed down.
That's one aspect. But if the students in general, have an aptitude to do science, engineering, etc, they can forge ahead. And if we look at the current young students who are coming out, they're highly skilled, able to take new techniques, new technologies, new programming skills; whatever skills or toolkits are needed for addressing the science questions, they're ready to do it. But what we are lacking right now is them to convert them into communication mode or write them into a paper. Now, we can see that the students in the undergrad level are producing research papers. Previously, 10 years ago, it was not heard of - undergrad-level students writing research papers.
They can do the basic part but the writing skill is still missing. If we invest in it, it will really be beneficial. And the quality of research which has been carried out in the country will also actually move up quite a bit.

 

Are students aware and conversant about the plagiarism rules that exist?

Yeah. So there are a lot of courses on ethics and the way we talk about ethics has also changed over a timescale. I am a chief editor in the astronomy journal of the country - Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy. I see that the authors have become more and more aware of what plagiarism is and how it can be avoided. And there are tools that can tell us that there is plagiarism. Previously, students didn't know how much the fraction is, what is allowed etc. Now the software is available so students can check it themselves. Even basic small projects or even short-term internship projects are tested for plagiarism. So everybody is more aware and they also know how to handle it.

How will NEP make a difference in the research arena?

This mode of starting to do things at an earlier stage, like research at an earlier stage and allowing students’ credits to not be frozen into a particular programme, the agility and transferring students’ credits from one course to the other, can actually benefit them a lot, because there may be some questions which cannot be solved by the existing framework. It has to be solved only by a kind of disruptive model.
And the disruption can take place by someone who is not used to this problem, coming into the scene and saying - hello, I think I saw this somewhere else. This is something similar. I can solve it. So, this kind of unusual combination can be brought in.