The Road
Breaking barriers
Transforming higher education in India through interdisciplinary research and collaboration
By Gauri Kohli
The world's most pressing challenges, such as climate change, pandemics and sustainable development, require solutions that transcend individual disciplines. Recognising this, India is leveraging interdisciplinary research to internationalise its higher education system.
Recent initiatives like the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 encourage Indian institutions to promote interdisciplinary research, enabling them to engage more effectively in global dialogues and attract international recognition. It also steers institutions towards increased competitiveness, enhanced research outcomes and improved student learning experiences.
On stage at the 2024 QS India Summit, experts reaffirm this sentiment in a panel discussion. The theme of the event in Chennai, “Empowering Excellence: Unleashing the Potential of Partnerships and Collaboration in Indian Higher Education”, will go onto unpack what the realities of these challenges over the three day even in early February.
Why cross-discipline research is important
Professor Colin Bailey, President and Principal of Queen Mary University of London, highlights the importance of cross-disciplinary collaboration in global research and education, particularly in the context of expanding operations in India.
Using the example of NEP 2020, which is built on the five pillars of access, equity, quality, affordability and accountability, Professor Bailey says that the policy also promotes multidisciplinary education and research in India.
The Anusandhan National Research Foundation Bill 2023 in India also focuses on this. “As university leaders, it is our responsibility to create the environment to foster the growth of this form of research,” says Professor Bailey.
He urges higher education leaders to define what makes their graduates distinctive to compete globally. Universities that consistently produce impactful interdisciplinary research gain international recognition and prestige. This can lead to increased student and faculty mobility, partnerships with top universities abroad, and ultimately, a more internationalised higher education sector in India.
Professor Dawn Freshwater, Vice Chancellor of the University of Auckland, the panel moderator, emphasises the critical nature of cross-disciplinary research and educational collaboration. She stresses that no single researcher, institution or country can solve global issues alone, making such research essential.
Professor Bailey adds to this by emphasising the importance of bringing together different disciplines both within and outside universities to address challenges such as climate change, health inequalities, water and food security and the ethical use of AI.
Challenges that come along the way
As the top sender of students abroad and with increasing attention on internationalising higher education by national and state governments, India is positioned to play a significant role in shaping global academic landscapes. However, to succeed, universities must address challenges in implementing strategies to boost multi-stream research and collaborative education.
Professor C. Muthamizhchelvan, Vice-Chancellor, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Tamil Nadu, reflects on how India’s main challenge is its “siloed education system”.
“The rigid structure of the Indian education system with its emphasis on compartmentalised learning and entrance exams discourages interdisciplinary thinking from a young age,” says Professor Muthamizhchelvan.
“The other challenge is the discipline-based department structure in institutions, which is a barrier to implementing diverse and multi-stream programmes.”
The linguistic diversity in India can also pose a lot of challenges in communication and collaboration within teams from different streams, he adds, especially when the faculty and students are from different regions and they speak different languages. “The faculty also need to come out of their comfort zones and collaborate with their peers from other disciplines,” he notes.
Many Indian universities, he adds, lack dedicated centres or resources for such research and teaching. There is need to create more multi-disciplinary faculty positions and the institutions need to fund more research and collaborative initiatives.
More efforts needed to create transdisciplinary graduates
Professor Stephen Flint, AVP International, University of Manchester, emphasises the importance of interactions between faculty and students from different disciplines to solve large-scale problems. Expanding on this idea, Professor Koen Lamberts, President and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Sheffield, says that breaking silos requires being prepared to change the structure of an institution. “That means that you have to be prepared to change how you allocate resources, how you manage activities, how you divide those activities, how you carve them up, and ultimately how you thereby guide people towards certain behaviours,” he says.
The panellists also discuss if “transdisciplinary graduates” exist and what the graduate profile of the future will look like. Professor Melinda Fitzgerald, Interim Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research at Curtin University, highlights the need for graduates to be innovative, creative, and entrepreneurial, globally engaged and responsive, effective communicators with digital competence, and industry-connected and career-capable. “So that means that they’re not just ingesting information and regurgitating it, they’re actually able to apply it creatively, apply critical thinking to that knowledge,” she says.
“Our graduates also need to be effective communicators with digital competence and they must be industry connected and career capable,” adds Professor Fitzgerald.
Some examples of Indian higher education institutions focusing on interdisciplinary research and education collaboration include Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, which offers various research-level programmes in areas such as cyber security, design, earth science, photonics science and engineering.
Other examples include Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad’s Ph.D. Programme in Management that provides a diverse set of opportunities for such diverse learning and research and Manipal Academy of Higher Education in Manipal, India, which has set up the Manipal Multidisciplinary Developmental Research Centre that encourages research in this direction.