Scope and Challenges of Incorporating Citizen Science into Indian Higher Education Institutions: A Case Study

Abstract

Citizen Science (CS) is gaining popularity among a section of the Indian Research Community as a potential cost-effective tool to generate and gather large-scale temporospatial-distributed research data with the help of non-scientist citizens ready to volunteer their free time for science and societal issues. However, CS activities in India seem confined to a few selected research disciplines at selected geolocations. This poses challenges and scope to incorporating CS into all Indian Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) as an experimental learning tool. We conducted a pan-India, online survey and assessed the scope and challenges of CS in Indian HEIs. The survey recorded the perception of all stockholders irrespective of their academic and professional background for four months, from January to May 2021. Survey results revealed explicit geographical and research discipline-wise biases in participants' acquaintance and preference for CS. Agriculture/Biodiversity/Ecology/Environment Science disciplines recorded around 67% of responses. More than two-thirds of respondents conveyed their interest in CS. However, they highlighted the lack of hand-on-experience and opportunity for formal training on CS at schools/university levels. The study emphasized the inclusion of the CS curriculum in the mainstream education system to train the next generation of researchers on several aspects of CS and tap its potential for large-scale research studies in all higher education disciplines.