Last Updated:
I-STEM, a central government initiative, aims to support researchers by helping them connect with public-funded research facilities
The central government on November 5 conducted I-STEM’s flagship event ‘Samavesha’ at the University of Ladakh. (Instagram)
The education ministry (MoE) has asked directors of all IITs, heads of departments (HODs) at all universities, colleges and other higher education institutes to “pro-actively participate” in I-STEM (Indian Science, Technology, and Engineering facilities Map) by allowing access to their research labs, News18 has learnt.
I-STEM, a central government initiative from the office of principal scientific adviser to strengthen the R&D ecosystem, aims to support researchers by helping them connect with public-funded research facilities to carry out experiments. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had launched it in January 2020. It runs through a national portal where researchers can submit their requests for the equipment they require with the institutions listed on the site wherever they are located.
The ministry last month held a meeting with directors of all IITs, NITs, heads of universities and institutes that are into research and have functional labs, research parks and incubators, and told them to respond to the requests pouring in on the I-STEM portal in the shortest possible time.
This is mainly because 80-90% of research facilities and labs with advanced scientific equipment are located in the top higher education institutions such as IITs, NITs, and centrally-funded universities.
The move came after officials from the I-STEM portal found that most of the institutions were not forthcoming enough to allow access to their research facilities and the requests from researchers remained pending for months, it is learnt.
Harilal Bhaskar, chief operating officer and national coordinator, I-STEM, said, that it is only over the past six months that the response to the requests from the higher education institutions on the portal has improved and now the gap left is around 20%-30%.
THE CHALLENGES
“Initially, the institutions were not cooperating. A top-down approach was needed to bring this into effect. Over the past six months, the portal has been optimised with better and faster response to requests after we took effective measures and requested the ministries concerned, including MoE and agriculture, to intervene and direct institutions under them to participate more actively. We had requests pending for as long as six months to a year, which is not the case now,” said Bhaskar.
There were several factors why the response from government institutions was weak, which included the lack of incentives or scope of revenue generation for them in this exercise. Also, there was a lack of operators — the point of contact who will respond to the request and guide the researchers to access the facility.
“While private institutions would respond much better because of the scope for revenue generation, government institutions often said they didn’t have resources to pay an operator specifically for this purpose. Most labs had the faculty members only as operators, who were busy with their own projects and the equipment would be blocked many times for internal training of students,” he said.
So, he added, to address this issue, I-STEM has started to offer training to students who would want to become operators at the research facilities and have suggested starting with interns. Some institutions, for example, IIT-Karnataka have come forward on the suggestion and allowed students to be trained for the role of operator.
REACHING OUT TO REMOTE AREAS, TIER-III AND IV CITIES
Besides, he said, currently around 100-200 requests a day pour in on the portal, which should be much more, and hence I-STEM is taking steps to increase awareness of the portal so that more and more researchers around the country, including remote parts such as Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) as well as those in tier-III and IV cities, get to know about it and improve their research with advanced equipment available in facilities at institutions around them.
The central government on November 5 conducted I-STEM’s flagship event ‘Samavesha’ at the University of Ladakh to create awareness about the national portal. The Samavesha project connects industries, researchers and start-ups looking to avail advanced scientific equipment with an academic institution that has the requisite equipment.
“This saves the researchers, industry and start-ups the prohibitive capital expenditure of purchasing advanced equipment. This prevents duplication of resources in the research institutions,” said Bhaskar.
The I-STEM’s plan for the next three years is to expand awareness of the national portal across the 36 states and union territories, starting from the top of the map to east, north-east, west and the middle parts of the country. “Tier-III and IV cities are where the major challenges lie, as they don’t have as many research institutions or quality labs around them. We organise workshops and training programmes to enhance research capabilities of scientists and engineers in these regions. We are also working on creating a pool of skilled operators who can be placed in tier-III and IV or tier-I and II city institutions facilitating partnerships as well as encouraging collaborations between researchers from tier III and IV cities with experts at premier institutes such as the IITs and NITs,” he said.
Also, the I-STEM has tied up with the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), which helps facilitate the process of connecting researchers to institutions. “We also aim to expand awareness on reimbursement of expenses incurred for accessing equipment, paid to host institutions, being provided by AICTE through the AURA programme,” he added.
