NEP’s Research Rush: Serving Up Knowledge or Just Half‑Baked Papers?
The 2 AM Club You Never Asked to Join
It’s 2:17 AM on a Tuesday. You have 17 tabs open. One is a half-loaded PDF on “Quantitative Analysis Methods”, another is a YouTube tutorial on “How to NOT plagiarise”, and the third, most important one, is “deciding between ordering Chilli Paneer or Chilli Potato”.
Welcome. You’ve just been inducted into the “Mandatory Research Scholar’s Club,” courtesy of the NEP. The membership fee? Your sleep schedule and your sanity.
This isn’t just a funny anecdote—it’s the lived reality of thousands of students who are juggling deadlines, clueless guidance, and a policy that promised transformation but often delivers exhaustion.
The Dream vs. The Reality: The Michelin Star Ambition
Let’s be fair. The idea behind making research a cornerstone of the NEP was Michelin-star worthy. The vision was to transform us from syllabus-guzzling robots into innovative thinkers. We were supposed to be the next generation of problem-solvers, discovering cures, and writing papers that would change the world. A noble dream, right?
“The reality, however, feels less like a gourmet kitchen and more like a chaotic hostel pantry at midnight”. We’ve been handed a complex recipe, but with half the ingredients missing and an oven that’s probably a fire hazard.
The Recipe for Disaster: A Step-by-Step Guide to Cooking Up Chaos
Step 1: The “Mystery Box” Ingredient – Forced & Rushed Topics
You don’t get to choose your ingredients. You’re handed a “mystery box”— a mandatory research project you might have zero passion for.
The goal isn't to build our minds, rather it just seems like a box ticking. No knowledge is added to our brains. We all just shuffle ourselves from one website to the other in search of Research content.
Step 2: “Faculty in a tizzy”- When Your Guide is Also Guessing
Every great dish needs a master chef to help in preparing. But what happens when your professor, a world-class expert in Environmental Economics, is suddenly assigned to guide your research on the Role of AI in Human Resource management ?
Our professors are brilliant, but many are being stretched into fields outside their expertise. It’s less mentorship, more mutual Googling under the table.
Step 3: The 2-Minute Noodle Timeline – For a 5-Course Meal
The NEP wants a well-marinated, slow-cooked, perfectly plated research paper. But it gives us the timeline of 2-minute noodles. A proper research paper needs time to breathe—to read, to think, to make mistakes, to analyse.
When you have to deliver a “masterpiece” in a few short months alongside five other subjects and a social life, you don’t get innovation. You get intellectual cheating and copy pasting.
Step 4: Cooking Without Knowing How to Light the Stove – The Skill Gap
And the final ingredient in our disaster recipe? We’ve been asked to cook, but no one taught us the basics. What’s a literature review? How do you write a research question? What’s the difference between plagiarism and paraphrasing?
We’re expected to navigate complex concepts like “research ethics” and “methodology” with the equivalent of a pamphlet. It’s like being told to perform surgery with a butter knife.
The Final Dish: What Are We Serving?
So what comes out of this chaotic kitchen? A dish that looks okay on the outside but is raw on the inside. We’re producing a mountain of paper-thin papers—research that is technically “done” but “intellectually dead”.
The result isn’t a generation of innovators; it’s a generation of students who are burnt out and view research—a potentially beautiful process—as a punishment.the result starts with a youtube video on “how to write a research paper” and ends with “hey chatgpt, draft a research paper for me”.
And it’s not just students. Faculty, too, are stretched thin—teaching, handling admin, and now supervising rushed projects in fields they may not fully command. The system is exhausting both sides of the table.
The Bigger Picture – Why It Matters
This isn’t just about sleepless nights or the enlarging skill gap. The consequences ripple outward:
A flood of shallow, repetitive papers dilutes India’s academic credibility.
Missed opportunities in critical fields like technology, healthcare, and social sciences.
A widening gap between India and countries with robust research ecosystems, such as Germany or South Korea, where funding, autonomy, and mentorship are prioritized.
Quantity without quality risks reducing research to noise rather than knowledge.
India’s Global Citation and Collaboration Performance- The Reality
International Collaboration: The international co-authorship and collaboration rate in India lags the global norm. Top collaborating countries include the United States (32.4%) and Germany (14.9%), followed by China and the UK.
However, the scale and quality of such collaborations are concentrated in a handful of elite institutions, leaving the majority of Indian HEIs with limited exposure to global research networks
Citation Impact and Recognition: India’s normalized citation metrics, H-index, and representation among highly cited researchers and top quartile journals remain below the level expected for its output volume.
In 2024, India’s H-index places it 19th worldwide, with both average and total citations per paper substantially lower than those for the US, UK, Germany, and emerging science powers like China and South Korea.
Conclusion – Can We Fix This Recipe?
At its heart, the NEP’s push for research was never the villain. The intent was noble: to spark curiosity, to turn classrooms into incubators of ideas, and to give students the thrill of discovery. But somewhere between the policy document and the classroom, the recipe went wrong.
India stands at a historic crossroads. The NEP 2020 has created the blueprint for modernizing its research ecosystem. The opportunity is vast—but so is the risk of being remembered as the world’s biggest source of shallow, low-impact research rather than as a true innovator and global thought leader.
To rise, India must change not just its education and research policies, but its academic culture, metrics, and mindset. Quality, integrity, and impact—not volume alone—must define the next chapter in the nation’s academic journey.
If India achieves this, its bright minds and institutions will rightly claim their place among the world’s most respected centers of knowledge, innovation, and progress.
If India truly wants to be a knowledge superpower, it has to stop treating research like a compulsory garnish and start treating it like the main course. That means giving students time to simmer with ideas, giving professors the tools to guide with confidence, and giving institutions the resources to serve something nourishing instead of half‑cooked.
Because research isn’t meant to be a midnight panic meal—it’s meant to be a slow‑cooked dish that feeds minds, not just resumes.
Until then, the only thing the NEP is reliably producing is a generation of students who can cook up 2‑minute noodle research at 2 AM.
References:
India | Country/territory outputs | Nature Index
India’s Scientific Publications: Why Quantity Without Quality Is a Crisis
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