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Science and Technology Research Players in India 269
but other departments like arts (History, geography), and commerce (accounts, statistics).
Moreover, technical institutions like the engineering colleges, NITs, IITs, IISc, are recognized by
AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education). This study could not consider AICTE or UGC
ranking as it had to identify and map the best from both the categories - technical institutions
and the S&T departments of the universities.
There are a few web sources that ranked the S&T research institutions, but they could
not be considered as reliable sources as they did not clearly state the criteria for ranking.
However, there was one web source that ranked the entities based on papers published
(www.career360.com). This was used to arrive at the list of top entities that are profiled in
detail in the report.
The size of the country in terms of population and the geographic area, and the thousands
of educational institutions set up to cater to this huge population, made it a daunting task
to map all the research players across the country, especially because it was a web based
study, and most of the research organizations’ websites did not furnish the information for all
the criterions selected for the study. For many entities, information related to infrastructural
facilities, R&D funds, faculties, international collaboration, were not available.
Another challenge this study faced was to map the entities under the broad area of ‘Science and
Technology’ which embodies several sectors like environment, energy, ICT, Nano technology,
biotechnology, etc. This brought about a limitation in terms of deeper and more detailed
analysis of entities under individual sectors.
According to the Ministry of Science and Technology Directory, there are 4288 S&T research
institutions spread across the country. Due to limitations stated above, specifically because
most of the institutions details are not available online, and considering the purpose of the
study, it was decided to limit the mapping activity to the highly potential ones that can be
suitable for partnerships with the European entities.
Thus this report was evolved, which provides a detailed profiling of 125 best in class entities
across 8 thematic sectors, 400 entities in the database with an objective to make information
available about the Indian research organizations at one place, and a matrix of 145 entities
which maps the institutions for the 8 different sectoral departments they have.
Future scope of the study
The enormity of the topic of this study – mapping S&T research players, opens up a plethora of
possibilities for future studies. And this study has laid a foundation for developing more refined
competency matrix for future studies.
Instead of a combined S&T sectors, mapping individual S&T sector players will allow in depth
analysis of the organizations and will also enable deeper understanding and examining of
more number of entities under each sector. Some of the sectors that could be considered for
further mapping and analysis would be biotechnology, energy and health. A questionnaire
based, or an interview based study can be conducted in order to capture the expertise and
strengths of the faculties, R&D funds and their research works that are not available in the
websites. A questionnaire based survey for individual sectors could also help in a thorough
analysis and assessment of research institutions based on different criteria and this could help
develop a ranking system for research players.
Enhancing EU-India Collaboration in Clean Technologies