‘IIT-B most efficient among 6 institutes’ | Mumbai news - Hindustan Times
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‘IIT-B most efficient among 6 institutes’

ByPriyanka Sahoo, Mumbai
Mar 12, 2020 12:36 AM IST

The Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B) has outperformed six major IITs across the country in terms of efficiency in research publications in a year, according to a recent study.

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The study, by three scientists from various IITs and Delhi-based CUTS Institute for Regulation and Competition (CIRC), also finds that none of the departments of different IITs surveyed was utilising their public funds with full efficiency to produce patents.

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The study, Measuring research efficiency of higher academic technical institutions, was recently published in the International Journal of Intellectual Property Management as well as Inderscience. The study was based on five-year data collected from six of the oldest IITs — Bombay, Madras, Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur and Roorkee — for nine of their departments.

In this year’s Budget, the department of higher education was allocated 39,466.52 crore, including that for research. “India is a lower-middle-income country that receives more than 50% of its research funds from public sources or government institutions. A significant share of the public fund is allotted for academic research in India and it becomes pertinent to understand the efficiency with which these resources are being utilised and mobilised to produce academic research outputs,” said Aakriti Jain, a postdoctoral fellow at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and a former fellow at CIRC.

The study was co-authored by Ruchi Sharma, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Indore, and P Vigneswara Ilavarasan, Department of Management Studies, IIT Delhi.

The institutes’ patents and publications over five years were compared against the funds allotted by the Union human resource development (HRD) ministry to meet non-recurring and recurring expenses, the total number of full-time faculty members, full-time and part-time PhD students and post-doctoral students as well as the age of the departments.

The scientists found that when different departments of the same IITs were compared, the biological science and bioengineering department at IIT-Bombay and Kanpur and the electrical engineering department of IIT Delhi showed a 100% efficiency in terms of producing patents and research publications.

While the study does not specify reasons for the variance in the research efficiency of the IITs, Jain said a dedicated set of funds for research could help improve the institutes’ scores.

With most IITs facing severe fund cuts from the Centre, this study said curtailing funds is not a viable solution to improve research efficiency.

R A Mashelkar, who is credited for bringing patent literacy to India, said, “Historically, India was patent illiterate for a very long time. Naturally, IITs are new entrants in this field. What we need is the incentivisation of patents.”

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