Why research scholars across universities are protesting

Manash Pratim Gohain / TNN / Updated: Dec 25, 2018, 15:58 IST

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The last hike for the 1.25 lakh research scholar community was in 2014. With no hike since then and no communication from the government, scholars across institutions have joined hands to launch a nationwide movement demanding a better stipend. Apart from citing the rising cost, they claim that 60% of these scholars support their families out of this money.

Why research scholars across universities are protesting

Key Highlights

With no hike since 2014 and no communication from the govt, scholars across institutions have joined hands to launch a nationwide movement demanding a better stipend.
Apart from citing rising costs, they claim that 60% of these scholars support their families out of this money

NEW DELHI: What is driving the fellowship hike protests across centrally-funded institutions such as the IITs, IISc,NITs or the IISERs?
The last hike for the 1.25 lakh research scholar community was in 2014, that too after a gap of four years. With no hike since then and no communication from the government, scholars across institutions have joined hands to launch a nationwide movement demanding a better stipend.

Apart from citing the rising cost, they claim that 60% of these scholars support their families out of this money.

“The economic development of a country has a strong correlation with the research and developmental efforts which in turn requires more manpower. To increase manpower in research the stipend given to students should be attractive,” said Nikhil Gupta, national representative and coordinator of the movement and a research fellow at the Centre of Biomedical Research, Lucknow.

“Barring the research scholars, salaries are increasing in all sectors – be it private or government, whereas the contribution of the researchers are no less for the society. With inflation and unrevised fellowships for past four years, it has now become a struggle for survival,” he added. In the last 20 years the research fellowship has been revised four times. However, the last revision, a hike of 56% was in 2014 under the then minister for human resource development,

Smriti Irani.
Since October 2014 there has been no announcement on the increase in fellowship which is the major cause of this agitation, said Manoj Chahal, a research scholar at IIT-Kanpur. The protesters since September 2018 have met many officials and have made representations including signed petitions to the MHRD forwarded by directors of respective IITs. On Monday, a fresh petition was made to the MHRD by the protesting scholars.
“Several meetings and frequent rounds of government offices haven’t yielded any results. We researchers have no option but to keep going to the ministry and UGC. We have visited MHRD at least 10 times but even that didn’t work out. What is unfortunate if that even in 2014 the fellowship was revised after a similar protest,” said Gupta.
Another bone of contention has been irregular disbursement of the fellowship leading to scholars finding it hard to make ends meet.

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