‘No new money’ for India’s colleges despite role in space launch

Scientists from non-elite universities are largely to credit for India’s historic lunar landing – but that doesn’t mean New Delhi will channel more funding into second- and third-tier institutions or beef up salaries in the country’s space programme, researchers say.

This August, the country’s Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander became the first to land on the south pole of the moon, a moment that for many proved India’s technological prowess. “This is a victory cry of a new India,” said prime minister Narendra Modi.  

But for the institutions behind the success, the aftermath of the event has translated into few victories of a tangible nature. While the landing thrust the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) into the limelight, it is unlikely to result in political willpower to raise ISRO scientists’ salaries or boost funding for the bread-and-butter engineering colleges that educate the bulk of India’s technical graduates, researchers believe.

While ISRO doesn’t publish a breakdown of its technical staff by education, researchers speaking with Times Higher Education confirmed that a negligible fraction of the agency’s 10,000 or so technical employees have bachelor’s degrees from Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) or other elite institutions.

One big factor is pay at the government agency, which pales in comparison with salaries in the private sector and is unlikely to increase any time soon, researchers believe.

“In an aspirational society like India, with some exceptions, most young people seek higher salaries,” said Pushkar, director of the International Centre, Goa, and a member of the academic council at J. K. Lakshmipat University.

He said he believed that ISRO’s recent success was “very unlikely” to lead to a stream of fresh recruits from top-tier universities, with most IIT undergraduates headed abroad or into global India-based companies for more lucrative work.

Academics have been sceptical that ISRO would raise its salaries any time soon.

“ISRO is an old organisation,” said Mukhtar Ahmad, former professor of electrical engineering at Aligarh Muslim University in Uttar Pradesh, India. “It has done many remarkable jobs, but the recruitment policy has remain[ed the] same.”

Narayan Prasad, chief operating officer of Satsearch, a private company selling components and services for space engineers, agreed.

For researchers who joined ISRO – often coming from villages or second-tier cities – a government position was a “step up”, offering a “safety net” and good benefits despite the pay, he said.

But salaries – unremarkable for top graduates – were only one part of the equation preventing them from signing up to ISRO, according to Dr Prasad.

“Most people who finish their undergraduate degrees and join ISRO join at ‘scientist B’ level,” he said, noting that it takes a standard four years to be considered for progression into the next tier, regardless of how much a researcher excels. He estimated that, at this pace, it would take 40 years at the organisation to reach the top.

“The question then becomes, why would a top 0.1 per cent kid in the country wait 25 or 30 years to get to decision-making level?”

But Dr Prasad didn’t seem too bothered by the fact that the nation’s top graduates would be put off jobs at its scientific agencies. Even if IIT alumni emigrate, taking talent elsewhere, this “brings fruits as well”, he said.

“China exports products; India exports people,” said Dr Prasad. “A lot of CEOs are Indian. They’re able to convince management to have resources, manufacturing units, call centres in India – so that investment IITs have made is also paying off…I don’t see this as competition between institutions.”

pola.lem@timeshighereducation.com