Research in India

The progress of psychiatric research in India has been a recurrent topic of review and discussion in various meetings of national status. However, many of these deliberations have seemingly been performed as a part of annual rituals and have regrettedly failed to evince any signs of authenticity. The main objective of this editorial is to recall, at the beginning of the fourth and end of third decade of modern psychiatry in India, what the past 3 decades have witnessed in terms of researches in this subcontinent. This kind of appraisal appears quite obligatory in view of the fact that now a far greater number of students are getting exposed, both at undergraduate as well as postgraduate levels, to psychiatry and thus potentially competent candidates are increasingly becoming available. Now one finds that approximately 70% and 25% of our medical colleges have facilities respectively for undergraduate and postgraduate training in psychiatry while the latter courses are offered in nearly one-third of our mental hospitals. Since these teaching institutions are incessantly adding to our professional and research manpower it is incumbent upon us to orient the coming generation of research workers towards an objective assessemnt of research contributions made to date in the field of psychiatry. In this context two references ought to be quoted for further study (Wig and Akhtar, 1974 ; Neki, 1979). These authors have made meticulous enquiries into various areas of research which have been explored from time to time by different Indian researchers. Notwithstanding the fact that 75 papers are being published every year in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry, the only major psychiatric journal of national repute, in addition to other journals, one may like to observe that research has been rather scanty, and whatever areas have been touched upon are of necessity reminiscent of workers' predictions, preferences and personal likes and dislikes. On reviewing the literature one finds a liberal mention of priority lists of research topics which have been suggested, dictated and recommended by various stalwarts of Indian scene of Psychiatry. It is, however, equally true that a proportionate and expected response has not been evoked by these appeals. Indeed it is a thought-provoking issue as to why our manpower has not satisfactorily responded. A careful scrutiny of the matter makes me believe that this inertia in the fied of research may be ascribed to two main reasons : (a) lack of facilities for …