Best Practice: Imbibing research skills and marching towards centre of excellence in research

The Practice:

Private-non-granted affiliated college is purely meant for transacting the curriculum. Not much research is undergoing in such institutions, due to various constraints. While India is gearing-up to bring educational revolution by NEP-2020, it is expected that discrimination in HEI’s between private and government is removed. HEI’s are expected to take high quality research particularly in thrust and demanded area. The stakeholders of HEI must now start measuring impacts of the research by mere publications but to go beyond and commercialize the research. Additionally, students admitted to the HEI are from diverse socio-economic backgrounds and are lacking in research skills that industry demands.

With writing of strong research proposals, faculty of HEI could fetch research grants, and the management invested money in developing state-of-the art research facilities in the college.

Common instrumentation facility center (with high end sophisticated instrument facility), industry grade cell culture laboratory, and CCSEA approved animal house facility and the outcome from these facilities have helped us making our distinct standing. With the honest hard-working of the faculty, we could launch and imbibe ‘research culture’ in the HEI, against all odds.

IPR: 

Some of the key objectives of include:

• Establishing and imbibing research culture in the HEI;
• Improving quality of research that HEI takes;
• Promoting staff and students to take research with high TRL and hence potential of commercialization;
• To bridge the gap of research skills that industry demands and the present graduates competencies;
• To explore the concealed potential of students; To create intellectual properties, impactful publications etc.;
• To create network, collaborations with international and national institutions of repute;
•  

The steps that HEI takes include

• Promoting graduate/ postgraduate students conducting quality research; Hand-hold students writing manuscripts;
• Built network and collaborations with researchers/ research institutes globally and locally;
• Organizing national/ international events by the expert scientists from academia and industry on basics and advances in pharmaceutical sciences;
• Support and inspire students to
• participate and present their work in various national and international forum etc.;

Evidences of Success:

The effective implementation of the practice lead to many outcomes as mentioned below:

• NIRF ranking: the HEI has made its place in NIRF Ranking of year 2017, 2018 and 2021;
• Grants: 3 MODROBS, RPS, Seminar grants form AICTE;
• Collaborative research: resulted in publications with high impact factor;
• High impact publications: with PG students contributing in research publications with impact factors ranging between 5-12 with cumulative impact factor of the HEI 250+;
• Books and book chapters published in world’s most reputed publishers like Elsevier, Taylor and Francis (CRC-Press),
• Springer-Nature; Patents and other intellectual properties in credential of the HEI; Best research poster presentation awards to staff and students of the HEI etc
•  

Problems Encountered and Resources Required:

For private-non-grant HEI, there are many hurdles that needs to be surpassed. Some are as follows;

• Financial provisions to develop infrastructural facilities,
• high end instrumentation facilities in particular;
• Fetching grants is also challenging as it demands stature of institute of national importance/ government institute or institute with 12(f), 2(b) statuses etc.;
• Bringing resource persons of international reputation to the HEI is a difficult task, due to the rural location of the HEI etc.