DBT’s University Reforms Initiative

Back to the Basics

Biotech News (BTN): DBT has moved very purposefully to engage with the university system in order to strengthen and upgrade their capabilities for quality work in life sciences. What are the drivers of this renewed interest?

M. K. Bhan (MKB): M. K. Bhan (MKB): There is a consensus that we need to correct a historical error in some ways. Our earlier thinking was that universities are places for education and research institutes for strategic or applied research. This model seems to be an over simplification. Further, universities have been denied adequate resources, effective leadership, good governance and level of autonomy that would allow them to pursue excellence. There is too much of a top driven model of governance. The research institutes are like small universities where a few even do strategic research. They are able to attract good faculty because of their greater resourcefulness & small size and as a result take a large chunk of competitive funding. The end result is a distancing of education from research. Students without research experience are not effective and creative. Younger the age at which one is exposed to research, longer lasting is the impact. Universities have thousands of young undergraduates in addition to postgraduates and Ph.Ds and it is here that research must be supported more intensively and more effectively than has been done in the past. In fact, translational centre must be located in university campuses.

The second driver is the realization that we need a certain proportion of our universities to be science intense with an ambition to become world class in science, in innovation and in education. Of the 5000 odd universities in the United States, just 50 contribute about 70% of the total intellectual property. So there has to be an elite group on the top of a solid average. While the HRD ministry and other similar bodies focus on improving the average competence of the universities, DBT will try to build the elite group of say about 20-25 universities. It will do so by supporting education and research at the masters and PhD levels in those universities that have the potential, based on past performance. That is where our focus is.

BTN: What are the specific goals that are being pursued in this initiative and how do you intend to go about it?

MKB: As the fist step we send out a team to the selected universities to help undertake an analysis of strengths and weaknesses in infrastructure, inter-disciplinary research programs, skill and leadership gaps. Based on this analysis, we encourage the university to create a proposal to address the identified weaknesses and enhance strengths. Areas in which support may be given include infrastructure, buildings, and centralized equipment (for example, major technology platforms) and to provide funds that act as glue to bring disciplines together. We negotiate with the university for major indicators of success to which they have to commit before funds are given.

I will illustrate this with some examples. Institute of Chemical Technology (ICT), Mumbai is an institution famous for its chemical and engineering strengths and its ability to work in a private-public partnership model. It has produced some of the outstanding business leaders of India. Our analysis showed that ICT has great potential in power and energy research but serious weaknesses in molecular biology. So our negotiations with ICT led to the creation of a new centre around bio-energy. We supported new faculty in molecular biology with a research program focused on bio-energy. This has been a transforming grant for ICT and they have now started doing very effective research. In the next couple of years, the inter-disciplinarity and the quality of their PhD program around bio-energy will increase substantially in both numbers and quality. The other goal of this support was to encourage and push for a greater engagement with industry in this sector, and promote molecular biology and genetic engineering for breakthroughs in bioenergy sector. ICT has responded marvelously in terms of speed and focus. And this is a wonderful experience of what I would call as redesign. We have simply built upon their existing strengths and made them more inter-disciplinary around a focus area.

Another example is that of the University of Hyderabad (UOH). We supported a new life science centre which includes biological science, chemical science, physics and all the disciplines that are relevant to research and innovation in life sciences. This has improved their ability to scale up their Ph.D. program not only in terms of numbers but also quality. UOH committed to a 4-fold increase in Ph.D. enrollment, and noticeable improvement in the citation index or other measures of research productivity. They agreed to add new faculty and redesign their Ph.D. and masters level programs to be more interdisciplinary. This will fulfill DBT's goal for producing Ph.D.’s of high quality and greater inter-disciplinary content. Under the leadership of Dr. Hasnain, ably supported by other leading departments, UOH moved with speed, skill and dedication and the result is an excellent new centre.

We are currently engaging the Banaras Hindu University, a university with a rich diversity of disciplines and Osmania University, which attracts a large number of students from rural background in discussion for redesign.

We are working with State Agricultural Universities in a similar effort but with one difference. Identifying their research strengths, we strengthen their networked programs to bring greater research content into the education process. We have done this with Punjab Agricultural University, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, University of Agricultural Sciences- Dharward and GB Pant University of Agricultural Sciences & Technology.

BTN: Is DBT expanding this program? If yes, at what rate and in which direction?

MKB: As you can see in these examples there is a variety in the interventions as well as outcomes. In general, it is all about going towards excellence both in education and research. We hope to take about 2 or 3 universities every year and expect to cover about 30 in 10 yrs. The process of negotiation and engagement is repetitive, serious and requires critical thinking. This limits our ability to handle not more than 3 universities in a year.

We are trying to be slow and deliberate but to support quality and that is our philosophy at the moment.

BTN: In your approach the focus is on tweaking existing institutions and marrying their rich past with the needs of the future, instead of building new ones. Did you find a latent hunger for change waiting to be tapped?

MKB: When a university is deprived of support and autonomy for a number of years it loses appetite and ambition. A purposeful engagement revives that ambition. When we approach universities our first goal is to rekindle optimism, hope and faith, and remind them of the areas in which they have excelled. When I went to BHU, I was hugely inspired by the sheer scale of what had been created in India so long ago. I almost had the feeling that we had gone off to sleep for so long. So you are looking at some of these glorious universities that have had a great past but haven't been nurtured well in recent times. My feeling is they could show progressive excitement at future possibilities when they realize that we are coming not with incremental funding but with decisive support. That is really the key. I know of many people who would advise us to give them only what they can absorb. But when the approach is therapeutic you need to invest appropriately. That is why we focus on giving large decisive grants than small allocations which result in modest goals and outcomes.