'Won't ask our children to pursue a research career in India'

Tired of waiting for hikes and government stipends, research scholars took to the streets against the Union government’s neglect towards raising the fellowship amount in the national capital last week.

Sivaranjan Uppala is one of India’s emerging scientists. But instead on being in a lab, he lay on a pavement at Jantar Mantar, and went on a hunger strike until he had to call it off due to health reasons last week.

Uppala, a fifth-year senior research fellow at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali, was protesting against the delay in revision of fellowship for researchers across the country, and wanted to convey to the government that it is impossible to survive on the fellowship.

He walked down from Mohali, Punjab, to Delhi, where he and fellow researchers met Minister for Human Resources Development Smriti Irani and officials from the department of science and technology, hoping to get action on the delay in revision of fellowship for researchers across the country which has been pending since 2010.

A fellow scholar said that they need to spend 12-15 hours or more every day for their research, which leaves them with no time to take up any other employment. Researchers get their fellowships once a year; some of them wait for up to two years for the money.

“Our fellowships have not been hiked since 2010, and because of inflation and the rising cost of living, some of us are finding it difficult to survive. The government had announced a 55 per cent increase in the fellowships, but there is confusion about when it would be implemented,” one of the protesting students said.

The delay in hike of research fellowship is not the only issue.

Sunil, 30, and a PhD scholar in his fourth year of research from Institute of Nuclear Medicine And Allied Science, is married. He has not received his fellowship for over a year now. “I carry Rs 50 every day for my expenses; it is a tough existence,” he rued.

Sunil said that a typical PhD research takes about 5-8 years, and he is somewhere in the middle of this phase, so he cannot quit now.

“But I am not going to be in India for my post doctorate studies -- none of us would want to be here in a condition such as this.”

Pooja Pandey, a senior research fellow at the department of micro biology at AIIMS, said, “The government has been able to set up a Niti Ayog but they don’t feel an urgency for Anusandhan (research) Ayog which could shape the research and development movement in the country.”

The research fellows are demanding a system to have annual increment in fellowship based on some formula (linked to inflation index) such that the process happens automatically across all the funding agencies.

The protestors say they would not ask children in their families to pursue research as a career in India.

“You can learn A for arts and C for commerce; but B for Biology is not a good idea in terms of career,” says a protestor. They have written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi,

 urging his intervention reminding him of his inaugural session speech at the 102nd Indian Science Congress in which he had said “We want our scientists and researchers to explore the mysteries of science, not of government procedures.”

The protesting researchers said that they are now forced to explore the fabled Indian bureaucracy; and they want the prime minister to walk the talk.

Photograph: Sivaranjan Uppala at Jantar Mantar.