RESEARCH POLICY OF CUTM

Objectives of Research Policy
The broad objective of the research policy is to provide guide lines for undertaking high impact and context specific applied research so that CUTM will be well-known in the chosen fields in next five years. The objectives include knowledge generation, evidence-based advocacy, experiential learning and strengthening the curriculum.

Organisation of Research Activities
The research activities at CUTM will be organised in a decentralised manner, with minimal central coordination for ensuring standardisation of publication and high quality output. Figure 1 indicates the Research Organisation Structure at CUTM. There will be a Research Policy Group (RPG) headed by the Vice Chancellor with the Director (Research) as the Member Secretary. Other members of the Research Policy Group would constitute Pro-VC (Engineering), Pro VC (Management) and Pro VC (Learning). The Research Policy Group will decide policy guidelines and themes for the research at the University. It will meet twice in a year.

The Research Advisory Group (RAG) comprising of the President (CUTM), Vice-President (CUTM), experts from government, industry, civil society and academia will advise the Research Council about the desired direction and scope of research at CUTM. The RAG will be chaired by the President (CUTM). Director (Research) will be the Member Secretary. RAG will meet once a year.

To operationalise the research activities at department and faculty level, there will be a Research Council (RC) comprising Dean (Engineering), Dean (Management), Dean (TPC) and Director (Research). Director (Research) will be the Chairperson of the Research Committee. The Research Council will meet at least once in three months, facilitate the research activities, monitor progress and ensure timely publication. Every department head or a designated faculty from the department will have single point responsibility for all research related activities of their department and he/she will report to the Director (Research), through respective heads of the department.

There will be a Research Coordination Committee (RCC) comprising Director (Research), Coordinator (Doctoral Research) and Coordinator (Graduate Research). Director (Research) will be the Chairperson of this Committee. She/he will be responsible for research process standardisation, quality assurance, progress monitoring and publication. RCC will meet once in every month

In partial fulfillment of the academic programs, research activities will be taken up by the students at doctoral, masters and graduate level. Similarly faculty also undertakes research in its area of interest. The Research Coordination Committee will ensure that the faculty’s and student’s research activities are standardized, reasonable quality is assured and the output of the research meets the direction recommended by the Research Council. Accordingly, it will be responsible for enhancing research capacity of faculty and students, developing style manual, facilitating linkage with outside institutions and supporting in-house and outside publication. The Research Coordination Committee will create an enabling research environment in the university through weekly seminar series, symposiums, etc. It will network with researchers and institutions for strengthening research activities.

Themes of Research

Although faculty and students can chose their topic of research, considering the need of the university to be well-known in specific areas of interest to the region/state, they will be counselled to undertake research activities in the following thematic areas.

1. Engineering
   1. Low Cost Building Technology
   2. Watershed Development
   3. Water and Sanitation
   4. Smart Grid
   5. Integrated Energy System
   6. Renewable Energy
   7. Clean Coal Technology
   8. Metal Extraction
   9. Flexible Manufacturing
   10. Cloud Computing
   11. GIS and Remote Sensing
2. Agriculture
   1. Organic Farming
   2. Organic Manure
   3. Integrated Pest Management
   4. Natural Resource Management
   5. Horticulture
   6. Forestry
   7. Fishery
   8. Goatery
   9. Dairy
3. Management
   1. Medium and Small Enterprises
   2. Agribusiness Management
   3. Social Entrepreneurship
   4. Rural Marketing
   5. Rural Finance
   6. Sustainable Livelihood Security
   7. Development Communication
   8. Technology Management
4. Humanities/Social Science/Basic Science
   1. Gender and Development
   2. Sustainable Development
   3. Decentralized Planning
   4. Development Communication
   5. Technology-Society Interface
   6. Disaster Management

Research Publication

The output of the research by the faculty will be published in-house in the form of Working Paper and Research Study. Faculty will be encouraged to publish in refereed journals. The output of students’ research will be published as dissertation, theses or research reports. Each in-house publication will go through a quality assurance process before it is released to public domain. The Research Coordination Committee may delegate the quality assurance task to the faculty members. If required, language editing facility will be provided to the faculty and students. It is expected that each faculty will publish at least one Working paper in a year. The procedure for publication of Working Paper will be as below.

1. Submission to a committee (to ensure quality of WP’s)
2. Referee to review the WP internally and assess the criteria – theoretical, empirical contribution by the author
3. Literature review and inclusion of new material is required
4. Prescribed referencing pattern has to be followed by the author
5. Grading of WP’s – i) Publishable, ii) Publishable with revision, iii) Not publishable
6. Referee reports should be available in 3 weeks time
7. The working paper can be put on hold, if it hampers the publication of the same in a journal

Incentives for Research:
Incentives in the form of financial reward and promotion will be an integral part of the
research policy of the University. It will be announced from time to time.