'YOU WILL BE ABLE TO STUDY ENGINEERING WITH MUSIC SOON'

Siksha 'O' Anusandhan (SOA) has regularly featured in the top 25 universities in India in the education ministry's National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) lists. Despite being a young university, it had ranked as high as 16th in NIRF's first university rankings in 2016. Pradipta Kumar Nanda, vice-chancellor of SOA, spoke to Careers360 about the university's stellar ranking performance, efforts toward improving research and start-up eco-systems and more.

-  Atul Krishna

Q. Although young, Siksha 'O' Anusandhan has performed well in the NIRF. What do you attribute this to?

A. This performance can mainly be attributed to research and development -- a major component of the rankings. We have also done well on others such as teaching, but I will attribute most to research and development on which we have focussed more in the last 10 years.

We introduced full-time research scholarships. Now, we have 11 research scholars and are paying them Rs.20,000 per month. Then, we also selected good candidates and faculties from IITs [Indian Institutes of Technology] and NITS [National Institutes of Technology], especially in the engineering department. Our library budget right is now around Rs.5 crores.

We have also developed 58 research labs and 18 research centres in the contemporary areas of research. These include nanoscience and nanotechnology, material science, functional materials, health science and pharmacy, infectious diseases, tissue engineering, biomedical science, climate resilient crops, etc. Recently, we have started to focus on agriculture science.

These improved our research ecosystem. We allowed researchers to work through the night like those in national institutions.

Also, we encourage researchers to work with faculty from other partner institutions. This enhanced the number of our publications. 10 years ago, we had only around 300 published papers, now we have around 10,000. We have around 300 to 1,600 published papers per year across disciplines. Then, five years ago, we had zero patents and now we have over 420 filed. We are currently running 103 projects worth around Rs.30 crores.

We have started incentivising research with cash awards on publication in reputed journals and asked our faculty to ensure two research publications each year.

Q. You've been part of SOA since 2009. How has the university grown since then?