All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE),and now UGC (Picture is not clear yet by HRD ) the governing body of the technical education in India has made it mandatory for the institutes offering technical courses in engineering, pharmacy, MBA, MCA, Architecture and Hotel Management to prescribe some international journals. These journals being international are purchased by the colleges by paying valuable foreign exchange in the form of dollars and pounds.
International journals are required in addition to the national journals for the purpose of research work. However, the ground reality is that these journals are very advanced and it is very hard for an undergraduate student even to understand the topic being discussed. Many academicians accept the fact that these are unnecessary expenses being incurred by the institutes and in turn the burden is shifted to the parents as we have adopted the procedure of fixing the fees based on the expenditure incurred.
AICTE/UGC has not made any research about the usage of these journals and the benefits derived by the students but continue to make it mandatory even to the new colleges wherein the first year students are engrossed with other issues like admission, new college environment, transportation issues etc. With no time left for so called research.
An illustration attached herewith indicates that we spend around 900 Cr for subscribing the journals which can be saved in the national interest.
Even IITs in India are also far behind in the research by the global standards. Under these circumstances it is too unrealistic to expect research of international standard from institutions in the smaller regions.
Time has come to give a second thought as to whether we are in the mad race of competing with the western Universities and try to match them to remain in world competition in a hurry without assessing the ground realities? Do all colleges in India have potential to match the international standard or selected institutions be identified to achieve this goal?
Hope academicians and policy makers would make appropriate decision.