Indian Post-docs for INDIA
Kangkan Halder
Thursday, 27 December 2007 09:24 UTC
Dear Friends,
We the graduate (doctoral) students toiling day-&-night to get a degree, also learn many a techniques apart from doing all other day-to-day necessecities of the lab (logistic update, ordering, instrument repairing, etc). And most importantly, we are vibrant with ideas and dreams. And all this goes to a foriegn lab (no disregards what-so-ever !!) primarily for two reasons. First, financial and second, somehow the scientific recruiter’s prefer a Stanford / MIT returned guy with a high profile (Noble laureate Post-doc Mentor, couple of Impact factor 10+ journal publication, etc). Anyways, these are the ‘cause’ eventually leading to the ‘consequence’ of relatively poor performance in whole of Indian Science. I understand that most of the scientists working in India would agree with me – as a Post-doc is a trained scientist – he/she
(a) can easily handle a lab and couple of students
(b) would work hard and keepup the dealines alive
(c) are risk-takers trying to establish new ideas
(d) ........ and more can be added to this list.
Now, how can we retain ‘Indian Post-docs in INDIA’ – thoughts / suggestions are requested.
:)
Updated 27 December 2007 09:27 UTC
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Thanks friend for thinking through my heart. It’s really paradoxical that we all want to go abroad and wish to serve our country at the same time. I personally feel that post docs abroad are more respected than in India, which is another reason apart from money and impact factor, causing brain-drain. With this scenario, I believe that the only thing that can keep us at home is patriotism. Patriotism from the juveniles at home and the grow-outs abroad. To me, there is no harm if you go out for a year or two, and then come back with lot of vigor and expertise, and distribute science to the younger generation at home. This can improve the quality of science education in India.
Another good news is that we are more proficient in some areas of modern science, and post docs from other countries want to work in India. We should concentrate on those fields and help in moral uplift of science in our country. I am hopeful for a reverse brain-drain in future. -
Bikash: Thank you very much for your nice words. Well, its good to know that we are also attracting post-docs in some fields – and you suggest to concentrate on those fields. This is a really good idea and hope policy makers and science-writers (subhra ?) promote the concept.
But, in your opinion, how can we ENHANCE the ‘respect’ of post-docs in INDIA.
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Hi Kangkan,
Hope you can recall me. Well, this topic is in fact very interesting that forced me to write my views. Doing postdoc abroad is not much perturbing to me, instead I am more concerned about ‘Indian scientists staying abroad’, nevertheless it directly relates to the present topic.
I always wondered why Indians move abroad for science, what do they get there and why don’t they return back to the country. After being abroad for an year so far, I could find many reasons behind all this. Well, moving abroad and studying is not as serious concern for me, but I feel puzzled when I see most of them don’t wish to go back! Is it that problematic to work in your home country? In fact, the reasons that I could find are a bit bitter. I have experience with some indian faculties abroad. In short, they just want easy life! They severely lack courage to perform their socalled ‘good’ science in India (defining their ‘good’ science is another serious ethical issue). They want easy fundings, a lot of which is burned due to their careless and non-conservative approach. In contrast, they have to be competitive enough to get good funding in India. Conservative approach has to be adapted, not because we are poor, but to value the money of people. Most of them go back when filled up their CV with whole bunch of publications and now wish to have stable job for rest of their life, ‘publishing good’ does mean much to them now. Ofcourse, exceptions can’t be denied.
These days, a raising concern among me and my friends is how unethically these indian faculties abroad use indian/south asians students in their labs. Most of them are infamous for their ‘screwing’ tactics, the same that they themselves have experienced under their western supervisor. They take up enthusiastic students from India and ‘use’ them. Most of these students, who worked for long under these people are now not able perform well independently elsewhere. They generally follow the ‘devision of labour’ policy where not all students understand the whole project. Though, they might be getting their name on good articles, they don’t evolve as a good scientist and end up being a factory-worker. There are many such indian students in USA, who are just doing postdoc after postdoc and that’s their career ‘to work as an expert of a particular technique’. It was heart-breaking to realize that in many such labs student-teacher relationship is now turning into master-slave relationship.
On the other hand, most successful scientist in India were abroad for short periods only. There are quite many such scientist now. The good science should actually be scaled to the input investment also. As we do that, I wnt be surprised to see many south asians scientists among the top. Having said that, we can’t ignore the pitfalls in indian system. One major concern is as following:
We have quite a good education system till post graduation (based on that we are preferred in west), but what happens after that? We have same (or even better) pool of well read students as we supply to west, then why can’t we publish in nature/science/cell ? Well it relates to management and mal-handling of students that can be discussed in detail some other time.
Turning back to ur point, I would say it is extremely hard to keep the students trapped in India, everyone needs better scientific exposure and there is nothing wrong in doing postdoc abroad. The point is ‘to come back and serve our country with better skills and experience’ and unfortunately that does not happen with present mindset of youngsters. I will ponder over ‘how can we enhance respect for pdfs in India’ and come back with my views
N.B: These are my personal views, may be skewed. I would be pleased to see positive/negative responses to my views.
Kuljeet
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self motivation!!!
self motivation …..self motivation…..
i think thats the answer to the whole thing..
u cant expect anything that lies outside of u to help bring a change u want from within to bring about…
all revolutions started from home….
every journey starts from the first step!!
the young scientists must realize the real questions…..why abroad.. y not in india itself.. among ur own people..with ur family ,frens and ideals intact.. u would save so much of the extra academic struggle that ways…..
focus ur energies on the mainstrean task of science… -
Dear Kuljeet and Tani: Thank you very much for your comments. looking forward to read more
KH
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To retain “Indian Post-Docs” in India needs a lot of problems to be addressed…
1. Infrastructure of the institute has to be improved. It doesn’t mean that all the institute has all the facilities but it meant that all the mentors of the various institutes should have good interactions and collaborations throwing out their dirty unwanted politics.
2. Already a person doing a Ph.D., in India know that he will not be well recognized even if he works hard. Every students input to the research has to be recognized. If this is not happen every one prefers to go out as they already know the problems here.
3. Funds should be utilized properly.
4. A researcher entering into the post-doc at the age of 30 is not well paid or recognized as that of the IT persons at the age of 22.
5. The highly frustrating nature of the science student has to be changed.
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Dear All
As I post earlier earlier on Nature India , money is major problem to attract the talent. Regarding recognition, if you publish papers in high impact factor journals ( more than 4.0 ) from india than you will get recognition without any problem. In todays time nobody bother where are you, most of selection or appointment are based on research publications in high impact factor journals or h-index. Institutes can also take fresh PhD also as faculty if he/she has published good papers. Please keep in mind that all our PDF abroad are not happy in USA/UK. They also have lot of frustrations but money, complexity and other reasons keep them their. -
Dear all, It is good to see that people really realize the problem which India faces currently in terms of attracting talents and keeping them. In my personal experience, I can say that all we lack in India is the “right attitude”. After being here in US for two years now, I realize that its neither talent nor money that we lack in India for doing good science but it the attitude problem. Professors and Scientists (Supervisors) consider themselves demi-god(an asian mentality) such that they are never ready to what their students have to say who really work on the bench. I really doubt if even 10% of the total number of scientists in India have ever done a full experiment themselves in the last one year. The best thing they do is bossing around, meeting and free eating with govt money in seminars and symposiums.
The most disgusting part is the lack of trust on their own colleagues, even in the same institutes, what to talk of national level. There is a complete lack of professionalism. Its a common place thing in asian countries to interfere even in personal matters of students and India is no exception to it.
Above all, its disheartening to know how the “sciento-cratic system” is set up in India. Its not the novelty of the projects or innovativeness which gets funded but the contacts you have and how high are you on the scientocratic ladder.
I bet, even if the govt pours in billions of dollars, there would be very little progress until and unless we change our existing mentality. There is something wrong in the system as a whole. One of them is the lack of transparency in the evaluation process and the second being the “old age system” of training we impart. We are trained or are forced to become “followers of the western science” and not the leaders. We don’t promote innovativeness and when at all we do, we brag about it a lot. The govt of India has fellowships to fund novel and crazy ideas.But guess what, no information is given to put up in public domain as to who had been funded and what his/her crazy/novel idea was? Moreover, they prune the talent by putting age, institution,recommendations barriers. Why not keep it open , let all people compete without any barrier, evaluate it with strict rules by blinding it both ways (both the evaluee and evaluator) and put all the entries in public domain so that others are stimulated to think through them. To me, it seems that we aspire to have innovativeness and novelty only on papers but not in reality. We lack focus and direction in the true sense. I will just cite an excellent example. In most cases of research being done/given to a new student, the standard dialogs by the supervisor is ” kaam shuru karo, dekhte hain kya aata hai, phir aage soonchenge” (First, start the work, we will see what we get and then we will decide what we can do!). I would like to ask with all due respect, why the hell did you take the student if you had no idea what you want to do at the first place?
I have written very tough words which might hurt many people but there is nothing personal about it.This is fact and we need to face it.We must stop self patting and “really think” about doing something. Lets be more open and be friends with our colleagues and students and not be demi-gods. Lets develop professionalism, lets be bold to think out of the blue and speak it out instead of saying “no no, it is not true , nobody has shown it earlier, it can’t be so simple, it can’t be true etc etc”. Let there be a reward and punishment system based on performance and not on links, or position on the scientocratic ladder.
Its the change in attitude which can help progress Indian science.Money and salary won’t help much.A total transparency in the system is required.
I would be happy to see your comments.
Thanks. -
No second thought and I completely agree with Dinesh that it’s the ATTITUDE which matters.
However this forum-string questions how we can retain ‘Indian Post-docs in INDIA’
My recommendations would be
On Policy Side
1) Develop a criteria and measures to define MERIT beyond (only) the number of publications. This could be based on contribution to science as a whole (teaching, training, learning, participation in academic responsibilities, participation in science organizations, collaborations, direct commercial value based research, etc)
2) Give preference in hiring to Indian postdocs with MERIT as defined above for faculty positions (if we can have quotas for all sorts why not preference to our own postdocs). And have tenure-track kind of system so that the tendency of “I have this job no one can take it from me” goes away.
3) New pay commission will take care of the total salary a new faculty receives and hopefully it will be equivalent if not at par with the software engineers (but again excitement of doing science should be the first criteria for a postdoc who wish to stay in science rather the sum he/she receive in salary)
4) Develop infrastructure to commercialize the ground breaking ideas (out of many themes one theme here in big US schools is that grad-students/post docs once gets a clicking idea from basic science can commercialize it very fast…number of companies starting right out of schools are very many if we visit MIT, Harvard, Purdue, Stanford, CIT kind of campuses and around)At the part of mentor/ guide (and if any post-doc committee)
1) Not to see postdoc (or for that sake even grad (PhD) –student) as cheap labor but rather work with them to develop a bigger picture of science
2) Generate a system where performs of a postdoc can be judged and reviewed during the postdoc tenure rather then commenting after three year ….no publication….no development…it will be hard to get a position I can not recommend you….(Where the hell was you when a postdoc was struggling in developing the best possible experiment).
3) Treat postdoc as colleague and friend to help him/her realize his/her dreamAt the part of the postdocs
1) Publication is the first criteria that we will be judged on but to bring the MERIT, we need to be working even extra hours to keep ourselves associated with the peers, getting involved in scientific associations…just not as a member but as an active participator, training grad students etc etc along with the publications.
2) Bringing the drive of excellence in ourselves…Till the grad (PhD) studies we learnt and did what our guide/mentor wanted including replacing, reformatting, redesigning the smallest number/line on the figure legend for the publication…..Now as a postdoc can we push even further for excellence to THE BEST it can be done.
3) And again creating value based leading science will be the theme of success. We might be working on the most abstract concepts in the world however if it is not generating enough interest among our peers, if it is not solving existing scientific problem (or not appealing to the market place where we want to cash it in) give a second thought to it.My 2 cents
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I reread what I wrote I think my last two points
1) At the part of mentor/ guide (and if any post-doc committee)
2) At the part of postdocshould be taken under heading ”Enhancing the ‘respect’ of post-docs in INDIA” posted by KH on Dec.28th.
-CS
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