Odd recurring lapse by scholars in India | Arup Mahartana

Letter to the Editor, Mainstream

As an aged academic researcher, I like to ventilate via your magazine/journal my one earnest appeal to the entire Indian social science profession and fraternity. In my fairly long career as a researcher in social sciences, I have observed one particular ‘trait’ among the majority of Indian researchers who publish their field-survey-based empirical results without ever mentioning anything whatsoever about the date or period when the survey was conducted. Honestly speaking, most of the primary data-based articles which have been being published in various well-known Indian social science journals do not mention the dates of the survey almost ’religiously’. This practice (of course with a few exceptions) should of course sound amazing to any serious academic researcher anywhere on earth. I feel embarrassed to elaborately explain as to why exact dates/period of the field-survey are important in an academic paper.

There is invariably a routinised section called ‘Data and Methodology’, but there one usually finds almost everything relating to the field-survey undertaken except one unexceptional silence, namely about the precise time period/dates/years to which the stylised findings from the primary data, though majestically presented and analysed, refer to. This particular tradition or trait of Indian social science research output based on primary survey data bereft of distinct reference to survey period/dates is worth abandoning. The regularity and pervasiveness with which this flaw occurs in the pages of Indian journals would prevent anyone from calling it an ’oversight’ or ’accidental mistake’. It does speak about a perceptual feature. Therefore, I urge all of the Indian social science profession including researchers, research supervisors, journal referees and journal editors to take care and trouble for making sure that the precise time period/dates of the survey conducted is clearly mentioned in the paper with utmost priority.

Arup Maharatna
Formerly Rajiv Gandhi Chair Professor
University of Allahabad