The Indian Conundrum: Copy-paste Culture vs. Knowledge Production

In recent times, there is a lot of empty rhetoric of “moving towards knowledge economy” in policy circles. The bureaucrats, top-ranking politicians, businessmen and the elite-intellectuals often present knowledge-economy as a way forward for India. Many intellectuals and organizations all over the world have provided various definitions of knowledge-based economy (KE). The overarching idea is that in KE, the economic activity primarily depends on the knowledge (or intellectual capital). In India, there seems to be an assumption that somehow we produce (or utilize existing) knowledge which will lead to economic prosperity. So far, I have not come across any insightful public discourse that examines this assumption systematically in Indian context. The public spending on research and development (R & D) has been raised in recent years; however, there is no clear rationale for how that will create economic prosperity in India. Note that I am completely in favour of increased funding and encouraging research and knowledge production (as argued in other articles). However, there are some major hurdles for knowledge production. Until India addresses that, I am afraid, the increased public spending may not produce any public good. In this article, I will explore some of the major threats to knowledge production in India.

Copy-Paste Culture: In India, there is a culture of not recognizing intellectual property as someone’s property. People often assume that it is “OK” to copy and paste text, audio, visuals, computer programmes and any other forms of intellectual property. It is often the case that you have an idea and share it with your boss. Next thing you know that your boss has launched the product and taken all the credit. The big fish with power and money may influence the people at large and the real creative intellectual may never receive the due credit. The violation of intellectual-rights is extremely prevalent across variety of fields – arts, music, filmmaking, writing, programming, academia and possibly any field where one can innovate or create knowledge.  

            This is especially true for R & D centres. My colleagues working at various research centres (cannot disclose names for confidentiality reasons) admit that even when they come up with a research idea and conduct experiments, their bosses decide whose name is to be included in the research paper and in what order. It may happen that their supervisor gets to be the first author and their name is pushed far behind. At times, the name of the head of the department or institution is included in the author-list in almost every paper produced by that department/institution, irrespective of his/her contribution.   

            It may sound surprising to the outsiders, but this copy-paste culture is rampant in academic writing as well. During my higher education in India, I came across many text-books which were nothing but copy-paste material from books and research articles of other authors without any citation or references. It is fairly possible that an individual is pursuing PhD and have absolutely no idea of citation or acknowledging work of other researchers. Given the limited understanding of the difference between plagiarism and original work even in academia, it is unreasonable to expect that in the masses.         

No incentives for Knowledge-production: India’s research sector is primarily driven by the government run institutions. A very few research centres and elite educational institutions care for contribution of its faculty members to the scientific publications. The promotion of faculty members is often solely dependent on the personal relationships and seniority in most of the Indian universities. The tenure-track system which is based on publication of peer-reviewed papers, citations, academic presentations and teaching quality is non-existent at-large in universities. As a result, the faculty members do not have much of external motivation for contributing to their respective fields of inquiry.

            Furthermore, the leadership structure of the universities is ill-fitted for the pursuit of excellence and knowledge production. While talking on the higher education systems around the world, Prof. Stephen Heyneman made an excellent point explaining the difference between top ranking American universities and the universities in developing nations. The leadership structure in top ranking American university is very conducive for continuous pursuit of excellence. The board of visitors (mainly, donors and alumni) appoint the president of the university on contract-bases and pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars. In order to get that job, the highly-skilled candidates have to present institutional goals and action plans for the same – how the institution will achieve and maintain excellence, how will the resources be generated and how all stake-holders will be taken on board etc. Therefore, from the day one, the president has a mission and s/he is highly accountable. On the other hand, the appointment of Vice-Chancellors in most of the Indian universities is based on political loyalties and personal influences. There is no vision presented for the institutional growth; and there is hardly any accountability. As long as the system runs without much media outrage (possibly on corruption, lack of governance, or more serious criminal charges) and the political equations are in balance, the vice-chancellor can survive.

            In total, neither the institution leaders nor the faculty members face any negative consequences for not contributing to the knowledge production.

Poor Intellectual Property Rights: India has one of the weakest intellectual property protections to offer to its citizens. Although the laws exist, there is hardly any implementation. In addition, various vital definitions (e.g., plagiarism, inspiration, and original work) are not clear. This gives scope of various interpretations of plagiarism – for e.g., what if someone copies two lines from your research article, writes your codes in different programming language, or changes three scenes of your screenplay – is that plagiarism? I hope it is a ‘yes’, but I have heard varying responses.

Not valuing Creative Intellect: This is about the society in-general where masks are way more valued than creative minds. To make my point clear, let’s look at various fields. People go mad after actors, who simply follow director’s instructions; but the script writers who create brilliant stories, visualize their effects on the masses and develop characters that touch our hearts, go unnoticed. Singers, who do the same job as any other instrument players, get standing ovations, while we hardly care about the music-composures who come up with mind-blowing tunes that perturb millions of hearts. Our society over-appreciates what it sees, and fails to value the major contributions of the people behind the scene. This shows a lack of critical thinking ability of our masses. All the name, fame and money follow the mask, and not the mind. This gives a clear message – if you wish to be successful, get seen-heard and noticed. It does not matter where you get things (ideas) from, but be the first person to bring those ideas to the masses. Importance is given to the one who introduces new things to the masses, and not to the one who creates new things. 

This social scenario is very discouraging for creative intellectuals (CI), if they are unable to reach out to the masses. Eventually, they may feel – “why should I put in so much of efforts when others are beneficiary of it, and not me?” The frustration may lead them to the following routes:

·         Succumb to the copy-paste culture: Giving up sounds bad, but it is always an obvious path taken by the majority of people. A creative intellectual may start applying his/her energy in finding newer ways of copying and hiding sources. After all, even if one finds no gain in money or fame, this option reduces cognitive labour.

·         Stop sharing:  “I will keep my work undisclosed and wait for a favourable time. And if that time never comes, my creation will die with me but I won’t let any big fishes take credit for my work” – this can be their response to the society’s apathy for intellectual property.

• In Indian schools, this trend is widely prevalent. Very few students would do their assignments independently. The rest of the class would either get things done with the help of parents/tutors or copy from digests/guide-books or from the notebooks of their peers. Now, the students, who have done assignments on their own, would be very reluctant in sharing their work with their peers. This is because, like Indian society, the teacher focuses on whether the assignment is completed (or not), and not on how it was completed. The result is underscored and not the process. I have complete empathy towards those very few CIs in our classrooms.
• Find a place where CIs see appreciation: “Get settled in a place/country where your contribution is appreciated”- this is one of the biggest reasons why many CIs settle-down in the developed countries. Though intellectual property theft is prevalent across the globe, there is definitely a perception that the western world does a far better job of protecting IPs. No country can afford to lose its top intellectuals and suffer brain-drain in knowledge-era.

All three scenarios mentioned above are nightmare for not just the CIs, but for the entire nation. Especially, when the world is moving rapidly towards a ‘knowledge economy’ era, a developing country like India needs to begin valuing minds. Today, India needs an intellectual revolution. I have the following broad suggestions:

• Value for intellectual-rights must be nurtured in children at homes and schools. Programmes/courses should be designed such that creativity is encouraged in students. Every new idea should be valued and a student who generates an idea should be rewarded publicly in schools. Students should be trained to write essays/assignments with citation and references right from upper primary standards.
• Government and civil society must join hands to run nationwide campaign for spreading awareness about intellectual property rights, privacy rights and for inculcating a habit of attributing credits to the content creators.
• Clear cut procedures should be available for reporting complaints about copy-rights violations at every level. These complaints must be addressed within well defined timeframes without delay.
• The society needs to realize its greatest assets, Creative Intellectuals; and must revere their contributions.
• Lastly, the CIs themselves must raise their voice and be more assertive for securing intellectual-rights. After all only they can carve their unique place in the Indian society.

Note: A shorter version of this article has been published in Fair Observer international magazine on June 5th, 2013. It can be retrieved from: http://www.fairobserver.com/article/indian-conundrum-copy-paste-culture

How can India improve its Education System?

Let me be upfront and state it clearly – “I do not have any magical solutions”. In fact, no one can prescribe any solutions to an entire nation as big and as diverse as India whose problems are unthinkably complex in nature. Having said that, I also firmly believe the status quo will lead India on the path of major “demographic disaster” (as pointed out in this article) and it must be challenged. Now, the million dollar question is – “what is the way forward and from where to begin?”

Based on the results of international comparative educational assessments like (TIMSS and PISA) it is widely accepted that Finland, Singapore, South Korea, Japan and urban China (especially Shanghai) lead the world when it comes to educating their children. Over the years, students mainly from these countries have remained at the top spots in mathematics, reading and science. Though there is a great variation in educational policies in these countries, the broader common theme is that these countries have developed a highly skilled professional workforce of teachers in public school system. In general, teachers enjoy relatively higher socio-economic status; and the policymakers are able to attract top performing youths to the teaching profession.    

Finland’s case is especially interesting given that it has achieved negligible between school differences. It basically means that it does not matter if a child goes to X-school or Y-school, because all public schools add high value in child’s development and no school is “poor performing” in the entire country. Finland has embraced the concept of “equity” and gives all of its children quality education. By doing so, Finland has been able to ban privatization of education, which promotes inequality in Finnish policymakers’ opinion (for more discussion, see Sahlberg & Hargreaves,2011).

Nonetheless, do not, even for a moment, assume that I am against private schooling in India. Any government cap on private schooling will be outright foolish. One can do that only when the public school system has such low between school difference and all schools are high performing. Also, as the quality of education in public schools is perceived to be of extremely low levels, the percentage of students going to private schools is steadily rising (18.7% in 2006 to 28.3% in 2012 according to ASER Centre, 2012) in India. Some educational researchers and policy makers interpret this finding as a “For Choice” trend and the debate then gets generates between private and public schooling. However, to my mind, this is a redundant labelling, and the real trend is from perceived poor quality to perceived better quality education. If the government schools provide high quality education, this trend will be reversed as evident by Finland and other top performing countries. In conclusion, the focus of policy making has to be the improvement of quality of education in public schools, being mindful of equity, to raise educational outcomes of all children.  

Coming back to the question– “what is the way forward and from where to begin?”

To address this, once again we look into the mechanism that educationally high performing countries have for designing their policies.

In the case of Finland, we find a highly coherent approach linking national objectives → knowledge base → educational policies → practices → regular evaluations. For example, Finland’s national board of education published a report (study) in 2012 exploring what the expected education, training and demand for labour will be by year 2025 in their country. Based on such studies, the ministry of education sets five year developmental plans that direct their educational policies. In addition, these developmental plans guide the educational researchers to develop required pool of knowledge base, which in turn guides policies. In fact, similar mechanisms can be observed in most of the developed nations. Deductively, the logic model for this mechanism can be shown as below:

Figure 1: Mechanism for Developing High Quality Educational System

            It is important to note that through this mechanism all high performing countries have travelled on different paths, suitable to their social-contexts, to reach at the same destination of high quality mass education system. Finland has gone on the path of decentralization, whereas Singapore, Japan and South Korea have relatively centralized administration. Finland requires its children to spend lesser but highly efficient time in schools; whereas East Asian countries have longer school hours, in-general.      

What India truly needs is this interlinkage of its national priorities → knowledge base → educational policies → practices (as in Figure 1). India’s planning commission sets the priorities, but there is no serious attempt for developing the required knowledge-base. The number of premier institutions studying educational issues (e.g., NCERTs, NUEPA, CASE, CCS, ASER and so on) is frustratingly small. In fact, it is fair to say that India has paid some attention to the technical knowledge-base, but has brazenly neglected the development of indigenous pool of knowledge in educational sector and in social-sciences at large. So, when you do not do your work, someone else has to do it. Accordingly, out of whatever little policy-relevant research is available, the majority of the studies are done by international agencies (e.g., the World Bank, UN agencies, multinational corporations and international NGOs).

          Adding to this misery, the educational policymakers in India are mostly the IAS (Indian Administrative Service) officers, who, in most cases, may have absolutely no exposure to the educational research, and may not have any formal education in the educational field. As a result, the external agencies drive India’s educational policy.

            The Para-teacher policy is one such case of absolute ignorance. India has not done a single large-scale RCT (Randomized Control Trial) experiment, and almost all states have adopted this policy. Without studying short-term or long-term causal effects, how can a country of over a billion people implement any policy? The World Bank which supports this policy and conducts large-scale studies may have different interests and objectives than that of India. For examples, in the World Bank funded study by Sankar (2008), there is no consideration of long-term deprofessionalization of teaching profession or of teachers’ deteriorating socio-economic status and how that can affect student outcomes. On examination, if these possible negative consequences are found to be present, can such policies be really considered “cost-effective” for India?

It is important to note that OECD’s (2011) report states – “In many high-performing education systems teachers do not only have a central role to play in improving educational outcomes, they are also at the centre of the improvement efforts themselves. In these systems it is not that top-down reforms are ordering teachers to change, but that teachers embrace and lead reform, taking responsibility as professionals. Also, in almost every country surveyed by OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), the large majority of teachers report that they are satisfied with their jobs and consider that they make a real difference in education. T hey also make significant investments in their professional development, both in terms of their time and often also in terms of money, an investment that goes hand-in-hand with teachers’ reporting that they use a wider repertoire of pedagogic strategies in the classroom.” (p.g. 5)

It will be interesting to ask the World Bank why its recommendations for the developing countries are exactly opposite of the OECD’s recommendations for the developed ones.

Nonetheless, it is futile to blame the World Bank. It is after all a “bank” and may rightly be concerned about the timely repayment of loans that it gives out to the Indian states. If Indian researchers had conducted large-scale experimental studies examining relative effects of hiring high quality teachers and smaller PTR (pupil-teacher ratio) on student achievement, there would have been possibly some concrete evidence for arguing against the para-teacher policy. In addition, if the policy makers were competent enough to compare the effect-sizes in student achievement due to high quality teachers and smaller PTR, they would have been in a better position in designing effective policy. Research in various parts of the world suggests that teacher quality has a much higher effect on student learning than class-size. However, these issues are not well studied in the Indian context.  

Clearly, India needs to produce large pool of methodologically robust indigenous literature on its educational issues from divergent perspectives rather than sole reliance on the external agencies. In order to do so, India needs a central institution like the Institute ofEducation Sciences (IES) in the United States which basically prioritizes the areas of scientific inquiry in the field of education, provides funding for it, maintains database, and creates a pool of policy-relevant knowledgebase.

Furthermore, all states have to develop world-class educational research institutes that house the finest researchers studying local educational issues. In social science, there is no clear demarcation between various fields of inquiry. Therefore, it is imperative that these institutes hire psychologists, sociologists, economists, statisticians in addition to educationists to have deeper understanding of social phenomenon of interest. A trans-disciplinary approach in solving educational issues may help devise interventions and policies which in turn may drive holistic social transformation of communities. In addition, the state policymakers are integral part of these institutions and are briefed at regular intervals. These researchers are also encouraged to participate in media at various levels and communicate educational issues/interventions/study-results/policies to the masses. Also, the university faculty members may also be encouraged to contribute to this knowledge production through designing their tenure-track that encourages research [Note: at present, most Indian universities only look at the seniority of the faculty member for promotion].  

In the next phase, the research capacity can be developed at district level and gradually at cluster-level. This will lessen the burden on the state and help focus on more specific local issues. Also, states may design policies which encourage districts to develop data-systems and capacity for carrying out data-driven reforms.   

            A lot of research has already been done in the world. What works elsewhere should never be directly implemented in India, but should definitely be considered as a hypothesis for experimental/quasi-experimental studies. Many major  interventions like – voucher programme; performance-based teacher pay; designing effective tenure-track for teachers, principals, district administrators; professional development programs; interventions promoting learning through inquiry in students; counselling services; interventions for special-education programmes; technological interventions; interventions to encourage parent-involvement and so on – all need to be studied in various social contexts across India. The country is so diverse that what may work in one context may produce absolutely disastrous results in another. And a few institutions that the country is relying on at present are simply incapable of lifting this massive load of improving its mass-education system. India has to be intellectually independent and develop an indigenous pool of knowledge of its educational and social issues. If India is able to establish the link as shown in the Figure 1, it will be one of the major transformational phenomena of this century.      

What is stopping India from Quality Mass Education?

            Given that India is so vast and diverse, it is just not possible for any individual to summaries its highly complex problems. Nonetheless, I shall attempt to touch upon some of the overall factors that hinder improvement in quality of mass-education.

·         Lack of clarity of measurable objectives of education at all administrative levels (from central government to individual classrooms): At any level of administration, there is no consensus on what kind of future citizens do we want. I understand some objectives may differ depending on the social context. However, objectives in India differ depending on who is responding to the question even at school-level. Therefore, educators and administrators often do not see any unified purpose of their actions. In addition, the idealistic goals that various governments declare often find little policy support and are hardly ever systematically evaluated.

·         Cycle of Deteriorating Teacher Quality as explained in figure below:

Note: There can always be exceptions. Teacher in elite-private schools are much better off.

·         Highly Hierarchical Centralized Structure: Curriculum, school calendar, text books, school fees, all physical resources are usually decided by state governments. System is based on lack of trust and assumption seems to be that people will abuse their power if granted to them. Furthermore, the hierarchy descends in order of Ministers → State administrators → district administrators → cluster coordinators → principals → teachers (full time senior, junior, contract teachers). Generally, person at lower-level is “supposed” to be an obedient servant of the higher authority. It is highly unlikely that a teacher expresses displeasure regarding policy decision to a district or state administrator face to face in Indian system.

·         Low accountability of teachers, principals, educational administrators at all levels in public education: Government jobs in India are often considered as the most secured jobs. Educational administrators at any level and teachers/ principals in government schools may get fired only in rarest of the rare cases. In their study Kremer and colleagues found that during unannounced visits 25% of teachers were absent from school, and only about half were involved in teaching activity (Kremer, Muralidharan, Chaudhury, Rogers, & Hammer, 2005). This study surveyed nationally representative sample of more than 3700 schools during three unannounced visits. Results suggested that a 10% increase in teacher absence was associated with 1.8% lower student attendance, as well as with a 0.02 standard deviation reduction in test scores of 4th-grade children. One good thing is that inefficiency of teachers is at least being studied systematically. There is no research done to examine how efficient the principals or educational administrators at district or state-level are. Nonetheless, India does not have any effective mechanism to tackle irresponsible behaviour of her public servants.  

·         Memory-based assessment: Research shows that the teaching methodology of teachers and the learning methods of students greatly depend on the type and quality of questions asked in educational assessments. Thus, if the majority of Indian students are choosing rote memorization and superficial learning strategies to crack the scholastic examinations, something must be wrong with the assessment system. Most educational assessments focus excessively on knowledge and understanding levels of cognition (as per Bloom’s Taxonomy). The students rarely get opportunity to exhibit their in-depth learning. In addition, replication of the text of the textbooks is often considered as an “ideal” answer and is well rewarded by the examiners. Thus, persistence of this trend and high proportion of knowledge-level questions have basically converted educational assessment into memory-tests.

·         Poor understanding of Educational Science: Education as a field of study is often narrowly understood as “teacher training”. India has not developed educational infrastructure for producing curriculum designers, educational administrators and school leaders, school psychologists, educational policymakers, psychometricians and so on. In addition, educational researchers have hardly ever found significant voice in national or state-level policy making. Also, educational researchers have shied away from both electronic and print media and there has not been informed public debate on various educational issues. I would be surprised if any Indian, except an educational researcher him/herself, would be able to name even three Indian educationists.

I hope this article helps address the last point at the very least.