Scholarly Information Input for Quality Research: Initiatives of India

Abstract

Higher education in India witnessed tremendous growth after independence with systematic reforms. The success of any organisation lies with quality information and it is treated as most important and valuable asset. Quality assurance and development plays central role in strategic planning in Higher education. The major reason for more information is development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), which has made easy to publish and retrieve the documents over the web. There is no much control mechanism to check the relevance of information published over the web has lead to publish more documents, in which relevance of majority of the information is questionable. But, something is better than nothing and there is still some relevant, accurate, timely, updated information is available over the web. Publication of quality research may take more time, but the final output of the results will be useful to the society. On the other hand, more number of low quality publication will work against the system which will hamper the funding and attracting good students community. Quality information is the information, which is perceived and used by the customer. It has certain attributes such as accuracy, relevancy, free from bias, currency, trustworthy, and so on. In order to ensure the quality in research, the University Grants Commission (UGC), New Delhi, India has taken some of the measures to be implemented in the Indian University System. This paper discusses about various attributes involved in quality information, its impact on quality research and some of the strategies taken by the UGC for ensuring the quality in higher education research.