Intellectual capital creation neglected, says Beteille

In quest of producing more and more graduates every year, the modern universities across the country are lagging behind to fulfill the real objective of "creation of intellectual capital for the future knowledge creation".

"Universities across India for long had been a repository of intellectual property; I doubt how much it is in practice today. Creation of new knowledge is important, it's a social duty on part of every teachers and a society which does not follow this would lag behind no matter how much graduates they produce," said Andre Beteille, eminent economist.

According to him the universities should strive for the unity of teaching and research so as to contribute to growth in real terms, only transmission of the existing knowledge is not enough.

"Earlier the universities used to be the bidding ground of path-breaking research, but I am not sure whether it is followed today. Teachers should understand that working for the advancement of knowledge is equally important as sharing the knowledge," Beteille said.

To explain the rational of limited research in the universities, he singled out the emergence of different specialized research institutes across the country.

Though the best research institutes of the country are doing excellent work but most of the research works are project-based and immediate result oriented research which provides very little accumulation of knowledge, he added.

"The people who are funding these projects are just like consumers. Whereas the university based research can be termed as delayed return research, which often doesn't yield returns but when it does the results are far reaching," he explained.

Beteille in his lecture at the 28th annual general conference of the Bengal Economic Association also said that another worrying trend recently has been the drainage of best talent from the universities to these research institutes.

"Universities must expand in order to expand knowledge and include more and more sections of the section of the society. They should work for promoting more research which is of utmost importance in the process of creating the long term intellectual property," Beteille added.

Similarly, he pointed put the emergence of various NGOs who are engaged in high speed and immediate result oriented research, saying, "They employ a large number of ready made techniques after collecting the data and this sort of research generally does not lead to any value creation."

The lecture was held at the St Xavier's College in Kolkata.