India ranks fourth globally in research publications now, producing more papers than most of Europe combined. But Ramanujan himself wouldn’t make it past the screening round today.
Low publication count, no h-index worth mentioning, no collaboration pipeline. He’d be filtered out by the same metrics supposedly designed to identify excellence. Peter Higgs won the 2013 Nobel Prize for physics, then told The Guardian he “wouldn’t get an academic job” today because he wasn’t productive enough. The Higgs boson took 49 years to experimentally confirm, and that kind of patient work doesn’t survive quarterly evaluation cycles.
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Here’s the thing: over the past decade, Indian universities embraced the National Institutional Ranking Framework, which scores institutions partly on publication counts and citations. Research output became the primary currency because it’s quantifiable and easy to audit. India’s share of global publications has surged, but citation impact tells a different story.
We’re publishing more than ever, but those papers get cited less frequently than work from other major research economies. When citations can’t keep pace with publication counts, you’re looking at a system optimized for visibility rather than breakthroughs.
The pressure lands at the individual level through numerical thresholds: minimum papers, minimum impact factors, minimum h-indices that must be cleared before anyone looks at your actual research. A physicist at a top Indian institute describes it perfectly: “A guy comes in from Stanford with five papers of superior quality, but by our criterion—15 publications minimum—he doesn’t make it.”
Professor Amitabha Bandyopadhyay at IIT Kanpur is more direct: “Some people don’t understand excellence. They need numbers because they don’t really understand excellence.”
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The math gets brutal fast. Between 1996 and 2024, India produced 5,412 retracted research papers, with nearly half involving serious misconduct like plagiarism and data manipulation. In 2022 alone, there were 1,212 retractions. India ranks second globally in retractions, behind only China. This isn’t accidental.
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