India’s largest civilian research agency Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is celebrating its platinum jubilee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi is joining in the celebration on September 26.
The 13,500 staff strong yet aging agency with 38 laboratories was looking to get a renewal but is instead being tasked with training ‘school drop outs and XII pass students’ as part of a new Integrated Skill Initiative which hopes to train some 10,000 youngsters in a year. A job for which the nearly 12,000 Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) that dot India are probably better placed to fulfil.
Under the Rs 10,000-crore skill development initiative it is the ITI’s that need to be upgraded and linked to the labs of CSIR today but on the contrary top class research institutes are being diluted. Minister of Science and Technology and Earth Sciences Harsh Vardhan defends his new proposal saying, “scientists will get additional work force through this initiative.”
Linking national labs to universities was probably a more viable alternative. Vardhan a staunch believer of this newpush says, “only 4.69 per cent of India’s total workforce has undergone formal skill training, compared with 52 per cent in the US, 68 per cent in the UK, 75 per cent in Germany, 80 per cent in Japan and 96 per cent in South Korea.”
CSIR has a glorious past, but its future unfortunately remains hazy. The average age of a scientist in this once well-known powerhouse of industrial R&D has steadily crept up to over 50 years since induction of fresh blood has literally been on a hold in the last several years.
More than a decade ago it had a bench strength of about 6500 scientists which today it is down to half of that and many more will be retiring soon.
A leadership crisis has been plaguing CSIR. A year ago, more than 31 of its laboratories were without full-time directors and for several years, in the second term of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, even the director general’s position was being filled on an ad hoc basis.
Today with a renewed push by Vardhan only three labs don’t have directors. But on gender balance, the agency still lags far behind with only one leadership position being held by a lady in Madhu Dikshit as director of the Central Drug Research Institute, Lucknow.
Note: News shared for public awareness with reference from the information provided at online news portals.
