V Ramagopal Rao, Vice-Chancellor, BITS Pilani

Are Global Capability Centres (GCCs) in India are being held back to take decisions locally, at least from the perspective of collaborating with educational institutions? Prof V Ramagopal Rao, Vice-Chancellor of BITS Pilani says yes; GCCs in the country often require approval from their headquarters for funding and any major decisions, hindering local collaborations, he explained. 

“GCCs’ contract terms, such as insurance requirements, can be difficult for academic institutions in the country to meet,” he said.

In conversation with Nasscom President Rajesh Nambiar at the GCC Summit here on Tuesday, Rao flagged a few challenges that came in the way of building collaborations between GCCs and academic institutions.

“The R&D budgets of some GCCs are surprisingly low, even lower than their travel budgets. Only a small percentage of GCCs currently focus on defining and solving local problems independently,” he said.

He urged the government to step in to facilitate and incentivise collaborations between academia and industry, potentially through co-funding. “We need to move from transactional collaborations to sustained, large-scale partnerships,” he said, highlighting the significance of the endeavour.

Research integrity concerns

Flagging the issue of research integrity, which has become a concern in India, he said the country ranked third globally in both research publications and retractions.

“India produces more research papers per dollar spent than any other country. The competition for rankings incentivises practices like plagiarism and fake data generation, leading to retractions,” he said.

The government ranked its institutions based on self-submitted data. The current ranking system doesn’t adequately account for retractions or the verifiability of submitted data, he said.

Published on April 23, 2025