Defence labs bitten by attrition bug

It is not just the corporates who are bitten by the attrition bug. Even government establishments, particularly the research organisations, seem to be disturbed by the trend.

According to M Natarajan, scientific advisor to the defence minister, research organisations in the critical field of defence have been experiencing attrition a little more than normal.

Speaking on the sidelines of the inauguration of an international conference on high energy materials held recently at the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) in Hyderabad, Natarajan said research labs in Bangalore, Pune and Hyderabad under DRDO had seen people at the entry level switching over to the IT industry.

"Bangalore and Hyderabad have seen higher rate of attrition than Pune, with people leaving after 18 months to two years."

The fat pay packets and the chance to work on engineering-related software are the major causes for exodus.

"Working on a research problem gives the incumbent not only the perspective of various dimensions attached to it but also the kind of computational tools required to solve the problem. It is the chance to work on development of such software or computational tools required in the software field that has been attracting some of the research associates. The pay pull too is high "� as much as three times of what they would have received after spending five years as researcher in defence organisations," Natarajan said.

Maintaining that the defence research in the country was a 6,500-strong team and a chunk of them being on the verge of retirement, no mechanism had been put in place yet to check the attrition, Natarajan said and added there were about 50 research labs under DRDO across the country working on aeronautics, combat vehicles, armaments, electronics and computer science, life sciences, materials, missiles, naval research and development, human resource development and technologies.

So how does the DRDO plan to tackle it? By taking research labs to the universities (not literally though) and stimulating young minds to take up research. A healthy interaction between the industry and the academia would spur novel approaches to research problems, he felt.

"But this does not mean that we have opened the doors for all. We will recruit post-graduate students as and when required depending on the research challenges they can take up at their level."

"DRDO in this direction has planned to set up four centres that would be attached to universities and to which the Union government has given consent. One such centre has already been commissioned at the University of Hyderabad. While two more are yet to be finalised, another is planned at the University of Calcutta, which would work on sensor devices such as millimetric wave devices," said Prahlada, chief controller of R&D, DRDO, Hyderabad.

"R&D is like the first stage of a rocket launch that falls off while the company takes off," said Natarajan, an alumnus of IIT who was part of the team involved in the development of the indigenous state-of-the-art main battle tank (MBT) Arjun, right from the inception of the project up to leading the programme as its director.