Minor efforts, Major effects

Towards the end of this blog post, the blogger describes how her employer, IISER-Pune, has taken steps to address a few minor, but non-trivial, issues that could worry a prospective employee, especially the ones that are not natives of the town/state. This is a particularly important, and probably a peculiar, issue relevant to India considering the multitude of languages and cultures in our country that change dramatically from state to state and sometimes even within a state. An outsider might have to deal with not only a bit of a culture shock but also subtle discrimination. This reminds me of my own experience as a PhD student that was diametrically opposite of what folks at IISER-Pune experienced. And the issues at hand were pretty much the same. 

I grew up in Visakhapatnam, a coastal town in Andhra Pradesh. When I got a PhD position in Chennai, it was my first big move away from my native town. Also included in the "move to a new place" package were the issues pertaining to a new culture, language and life in a metro. The institute where I did my PhD was a center affiliated to Anna University and established on a Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) model with pretty ambitious goals for research excellence. In tune with its stated objectives, the center has a very cosmopolitan composition, both in personnel and the research pursued. People of non-Chennai and/or non-Tamil background composed a good chunk of the staff and student population. One of the unintended (and certainly unwanted for someone in my situation) side story of this PPP experiment was that the PhD students did not have access to the University's hostel facilities.  And unlike the Pune folks, people entrusted with the job of running our center did not deem it an important enough issue to pay attention to. Consequently, the students were left to fend for themselves with their broken Tamil and shallow pockets. The challenge was not finding a decent place that was close enough to the campus. There were plenty of such places. The problem though was with the people who owned these places and insisted on renting them out only to "vegetarians" and "families". Luckily for me, both my roommates belonged to this "vegetarian" category. So, we were only half disqualified to be tenants on account of our failure to get married. In the almost 5 years that I spent there, we rented 4 different places. Each time we had to spend considerable time and energy in the process of finding each one of those and in trying to convince the landlords that we did not intend to burn the place down. It is important for me to clarify that I do not blame the landlords of that locality for thinking the way they do. I am sure they have valid reasons derived from their past experiences for imposing those conditions on their future tenants and every property owner has a right to decide who to rent their place out to or not to. But the point I am trying to make is that knowing how things were in the community, the administrators could have done things differently to ease the life a little for the students rather than leave them to their fate. It could have earned them a life time's goodwill for sure.

Another such example of administrative apathy was with regard to our stipends. Some of us had fellowships directly from CSIR. The way these fellowships were administered was something like this. At the beginning of the fellowship year (sometime around June, I think) we had to submit a claim form telling them how much to pay us (as if they didn't know that already) along with a progress report and a certificate from the supervisor confirming our continuation in the program and recommending the release of stipend. These forms are submitted to a particular office in the university. Once this office receives the forms from all the fellows in the university, they forward them to the CSIR in New Delhi who process them and release the funds to the university which then pays us every month. It usually took about 6 months before this entire process was completed and some money showed up in our bank accounts during which time we were without a pay. This could have been fine for someone living in university accommodation and eating in university mess. As mentioned above, we did not have half of this luxury. So, the system forced us to develop a grasshopper like personality to escape an ant like fate during the dry months. Again, things could have been done differently. Since, the CSIR was going to transfer funds to the university, our stipend could have been payed by the university in the interim. As it turns out this mile was too long for them to walk. 

In none of the above instances, were the authorities concerned breaking any rules. They can't even be accused of dereliction of duty. They were just not prepared to walk the extra few centimeters to make our lives a little bit easier. And this is not something limited only to our university. From what I know, this is what happens in most universities in India. In some places, things are even worse. I have heard from people who had to spend money from their pockets to buy chemicals and plastics or to get their samples analysed on specialized instruments. I probably had a relatively better Indian PhD experience. Mostly because I was part of the above mentioned PPP experiment. Though I was part of the university system, I was also detached from it. I was also fortunate to have done my PhD with supervisors who, above everything else, were great human beings. Working from within the system they did their best to protect me and tried to minimize the influence of  the negative experiences. Most importantly, they did not let any of this compromise the quality of my research. Not every researcher in Indian university system is that fortunate. Often one hears the leaders of Indian science lament the decline of research in Indian universities. For all their eminence and experience, one doesn't get a feeling that  they are looking at the right problems and suggesting the right solutions.  Maybe because, like most of our politicians, they too haven't gone through the systems and hence haven't experienced the problems first hand. Hopefully India will soon have leaders, both in politics and in science, who have grown through the system and have experienced the problems to provide real solutions. 
Were you a researcher associated  with a state university in India? Do you have similar experiences to share?