The silent cost of India’s research boom on classrooms

​The current higher education system is doing what it is supposed to do, but the primary question is: can one person be made to perform two demanding professional functions simultaneously and indefinitely without costs? There is enough evidence to say that the answer is no.

This is costing us research integrity, classroom quality, and faculty well-being, which is becoming visible in aggregated data now. The University Grants Commission (UGC) norms require Indian assistant professors to fulfil at least 16 hours of direct teaching each week (UGC, 2018).

Most of these rules may or may not apply to many private academic institutions in India. Additionally, the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) framework commonly determines institutional rankings and eligibility for UGC funding, prioritising research output and publication volume as core indicators of institutional quality (NAAC, 2023).

Both demands rest on the shoulders of the same faculty member. But where is the focus on teaching quality? India produces over 278,000 scientific articles each year, placing us as the third-highest research output country (Times Higher Education, 2023).

Fake peer reviews make up about 33% of total research retractions in India. This is followed by data fraud at about 17.2% and plagiarism at 14.8% (Sharma, 2024). Current systems require professors to have a minimum of 7-10 Scopus-indexed publications to be eligible for promotions at different levels.

Some private institutions have their own modified rules. This builds structural pressure towards volume over academic rigour. One can easily say that these numbers are not much, but it takes a great deal of time, energy, collaboration, and resources to have even a handful of quality publications.

Tying career advancement to publication count, while critical at different academic junctures, needs to be taken with caution. There is no equivalent national metric to observe teaching quality. What is beyond the scope of measurement is often skipped, which predictably leads to the absorption of any residual time once research obligations have been completed.

The fact that teaching quality cannot be measured, cited, or indexed does not make it any less important. Teaching is as important as research, if not more. Professors directly shape young minds and lives through daily engagement inside and outside classrooms.

While it is very important that we don’t just disseminate knowledge but also create it, are we sure we are doing justice when it comes to disseminating knowledge to our students? The National Educational Policy (NEP) 2020 frames a transition towards a more inquiry-driven and interdisciplinary learning approach.

Professors who treat teaching as an extension of their scholarly work rather than as a separate structural obligation are doing what the policy intended to bring into classrooms. It is commonly counter-argued that research and teaching are distinct institutional mandates.

The current higher education system can’t be expected to modify appraisal systems as per individual workload preferences. Additionally, it is known that the global research rankings ruthlessly come with sustained publication pressure.

This comes with the assumption that the current system can produce the research output quality that the existing systems demand. Retraction data, predatory journal figures, and reduced R&D investments as a share of GDP point to a different picture.

Such a system optimised for volume efficiency cannot be the same as optimising for excellence. While this is not the case for some private academic institutions, as they may have better funding and R&D investments compared to most, the current higher education system must have its own systemic plan when it comes to making sure that faculty members do not treat teaching like a burden that needs to be offloaded to a third party.

Going forward, it will not just be important that data on faculty burnout and well-being be taken into consideration, but that we must also recognise that teaching is a significant job that changes people’s lives when done well and not just treat it as a side dish served with the main course of research.

Moitrayee Das is Assistant Professor of Psychology at FLAME University. Prisha Khanna is an alumnus of the same institution.