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BHUBANESWAR: The higher education department will seek application for innovative research proposals from young faculties (aged below 40 years) of different colleges and universities to carry out research works by getting seed funding from the state government.
If a faculty member gets selected, he/she will get seed funding of Rs 5 lakh for research. Each year 40 faculties will be provided with such funding. Duration of two years will be the period to show output of the research.
Asoka Kumar Das, vice chairman of Odisha State Higher Education Council (OSHEC), said application will be invited from candidates for research proposals within 15 days. “We had selected 39 faculty members last year for seed funding. One of them did not enroll for the programme. Now 38 teachers are conducting research on their innovative ideas,” he added.
After getting applications, an expert team of the OSHEC will scrutinize the research proposals and select the best of them. As many as 40 innovative research proposals will be selected for the seed funding.
The state government has released policy guidelines on ‘Odisha University Research and Innovation Incentivisation Plan (OURIIP)’ to provide incentive to some selected scholars and seed funding to young faculty members for research work.
The department will also seek application for junior research fellowship from some selected national eligibility test (NET) qualified scholars, who have failed to get junior research fellow (JRF) awarded by the University Grants Commission (UGC) or Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).
The period of fellowship will be limited to four years, extendable to another one year with the prior approval of the OSHEC. An eligible candidate can get fellowship of Rs 15000 per month with a contingency of Rs 25000 per year for subjects having laboratory work and Rs 15000 for subjects without laboratory work. The number of fellowship in each subject is limited to five with two fellowships reserved for girl students. It will be given in 35 subjects.
He said the candidate must be below 30 years of age as on January first of the year in which the fellowship award is being made. “The Centre’s National Education Policy (NEP) has mentioned about funding for researchers, but we had taken decision about seed funding and fellowship to students much before the NEP comes to the picture,” said Das.
Source From : Times Of India
