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SUSTAINING RESEARCH ACTIVITIES

 

Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) German Theoretical Physicist  

Though many may go through the process of getting educated either because of family support or economic compulsions, all may not realise the fact that education is an effective tool to train their minds to critically think with a view to analyse or innovate. Research is necessarily a thinking process because of its probing nature. I was in my early fifties when I registered for a Phd programme and was fortunate to have Prof. Ramesh as my fellow research scholar. He indirectly provided the much needed motivation to me not just during the doctoral research, but even after completion of our theses, by being an excellent role model, constantly highlighting the importance of rigour that is needed for research.

Ramesh Narasimhan (b.1955) hails from a family of researchers. He graduated in Electrical Engineering with honours from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS) in 1978 and joined the engineering conglomerate, Larsen and Toubro (L&T) Corporation. He took a break from his work during 1982 to 1984 to complete his Postgraduation Diploma in Management from the prestigious Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM-B). After working for nearly thirteen years at L&T in various positions, Ramesh decided to work as National Sales Manager of a Technology start-up based out of Bangalore. Though he got promoted as Vice-President, Sales & Operations, perhaps his interest in research motivated him to switch over from industry to academics in 1997. After working for a short period of three years at Goa Institute of Management he moved over to T.A. Pai Management Institute, Bangalore Campus in 2000.

Having shifted to Bangalore, through one of his IIM-B contacts Ramesh met Prof. Sridhar who was teaching at Canara Bank School of Management Studies (CBSMS) affiliated to Bangalore University (BU) to express his interest in registering for a Phd programme under his guidance. Presumably Prof. Sridhar had told him that he’d get back as and when the University calls for applications for Ph.d programme. When I had met Prof. Sridhar for a similar reason during 2001, he asked me to talk to Ramesh and inform him about applying for the Phd program as BU had just advertised. Thus, both of us began our research journey together right from the application stage.

Though Ramesh was younger to me by a few years, we had several things in common – engineering back-ground, working in a big engineering company for over a decade, Post-graduation in management with specialisation in marketing and incidentally also belonging to the same community! Perhaps, this helped us to collaborate on a few funded research projects. During the course of our research, we (Prof. Sridhar, Ramesh and I) had taken up a funded research project to understand the prevalence and effectiveness of Industry-Academia Interaction that’d benefit Technology based Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and Ramesh played a major role as co-investigator. 

While Ramesh submitted his final thesis during 2007, I took a couple of more years to submit my thesis as I had some set-backs to my health during 2008. Meanwhile, having got his Phd officially in 2009 Ramesh joined Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS), Bangalore as a Senior Professor in the areas of marketing and technology management. It is a dream of many a student of management science to touch the portals of Harvard University. During 2015 Ramesh was deputed to Harvard School of Business by NMIMS for a couple of weeks. 

I got my PhD officially in 2010, but did not take up any teaching assignment; instead I chose to be a consultant / advisor to a few institutions / Business schools. Indo-Korea Science and Technology Centre (IKST) was one such institution which had its office in Indian Institute of Science (IISc) campus. During 2011 – 2013 IKST provided Research grants to NMIMS for three projects and Ramesh was the Principal Investigator for all these projects and I was co-investigator in a couple of projects. These projects brought us closer to each other.

Since 2002 along with my research I have been involved with a few eye-care service projects through the Rotary platform. Hence, I could understand the value of technology in the development of diagnostic services in terms of speed and cost. As Ramesh had specialised in Technology management, and as such we were working together on IKST funded project, I suggested him that we develop a case-study on an emerging start-up which had developed a portable Fundus[1] screening device. Ramesh readily agreed and the case-study was developed in about three months’ time. We submitted it for a National level Case-study competition organised by Indian School of Business, Hyderabad and it won the best case-study award during March 2012. This case-study was further polished (another colleague of Ramesh, Prof. Barnabas joined our team) and was accepted by Ivey Publishing, Canada which creates repository of case-studies for Business schools across the world to use them in class-room teaching. Even now we are receiving royalty from Ivey Publishing! 

Based on the service projects that I was working on through Rotary, we also published a couple of research papers at the annual International Conference on Social Entrepreneurship held at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai during 2014-16. In all such projects Ramesh led the research team and always critically analysed all aspects – research objectives, methodology, earlier research works pertaining to the chosen area and our contribution to the body of knowledge. 

On Ramesh retiring from NMIMS in 2017, I suggested him to join hands with me to write a book on Community Ophthalmology in India, the area in which I had implemented many service projects and he too was familiar because of the casestudies and papers that we had published over five years. It took some time for him to get convinced and finally he agreed during last quarter of 2018. 

After a few discussions about the structure and possible contents of the proposed book, starting from February 2019 we visited a few well established eye hospitals who have been involved in community ophthalmology over several decades. Over one year we covered ten eye hospitals situated across India – Bangalore, Chennai, Coimbatore, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Madurai, Mysore and Sitapur (Uttar Pradesh). We planned to bring out the book before the end of 2020 as World Health Organisation had launched a major programme, VISION 2020 in association with International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB)[2] to bring down preventable blindness to 0.5% by the end of 2020. However, due to COVID our travel plans got postponed and hence, the publication of the book. Finally, the book titled, Eye Opener chronicling two hundred years of evolution of Community Ophthalmology in India was released at the first Rotary National Conference on Community Ophthalmology held at IISc campus during May 2022. But for Ramesh, I may not have attempted to write such a book which was well received among ophthalmologists! 

Association with Ramesh over the last two decades helped me not only in honing my research skills, but brought me into limelight through the few publications that we had worked together.

[1]The fundus is the inside, back surface of the eye. It is made up of the retina, macula, optic disc, fovea and blood vessels. With fundus photography, a special fundus camera points through the pupil to the back of the eye and takes pictures.

[2] IAPB is the overarching alliance for the global eye health sector with more than 250 organisations in over 100 countries working together for a world where everyone has universal access to eye care (www.iapb.org)

September 24 , 2024 | Ravi 86 

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