Here’s good news for all those Indian university students who are looking to pursue research abroad! You can now get funding from the government for the same! Yes, the Indian government, understanding that Indian clinical research requires an uplift, has launched a scheme known as SPARC (standing for Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration). With this programme, the government aims to improve the research ecosystem of India’s higher educational institutions. To fulfill this goal, the Indian government has, under this scheme, planned to offer students a chance to work in at least 28 global universities. Thus, with this scheme, there can be a positive push for more research initiatives globally, which will include joint research in several domains like Science, Technology, Social Science, and Humanities. These joint research projects at foreign labs will be funded by the Indian government for students at Indian universities. The one thing that needs to be focused on here is that the funding will be limited to only joint research with foreign universities.
The Human Resource Ministry has also recently accredited funds worth Rs. 4.18 billion, accepting 600 research proposals from Indian institutes and global universities. Of all the approved projects, several projects are on food processing optimization, seed testing procedures, and enabling smart cities via IoT technologies from institutes across India, Australia, and New Zealand.
How does SPARC work?
The Indian government has facilitated academic and research collaborations between Indian institutions and the best institutions in the world from 28 selected nations to jointly solve problems of national and international relevance. SPARC proposes to enable productive academic collaboration and cooperation by supporting a number of important components that can speed up impact making research. These include –
- Visits and long-term stays of top international faculty or researchers in Indian institutions to engage in teaching and research
- Visits by Indian students for training and experimentation in leading laboratories worldwide
- Joint development of niche courses, translatable patents, demonstrable technologies, world-class books and monographs, and action research outcomes and products
- Merging of mutual cooperation through academic and research partnerships through Indo-X workshops in India
The scheme aims to help Indian students at the most advanced stages in various sectors like clinical research structural genomics, evolutionary biology, digital humanities, electronics, communication, and artificial intelligence. Indian institutes can partner with foreign universities that are listed on the top 500 QS World University Rankings. It also permits researchers from foreign institutes to look in on the Indian institutes they have partnered with, and conduct workshops to cater to tertiary students in their niche subject.
All in all, the SPARC scheme is expected to have a major impact in providing the best international expertise to address major national problems, enable international faculty to stay in India for long durations, provide Indian students an opportunity to work in world-class laboratories, expose Indian academicians to the best collaborators abroad, and develop strong bilateral relationships in research. And, all of this will ultimately lead to improving the international ranking of Indian institutions. With such schemes in effect, if you are looking to pursue clinical research abroad, you are definitely going to make your dreams come true! But for this, you need training from the best clinical research training in Bangalore, one like Avigna Clinical Research Institute.
