New Delhi, Nov. 20 -- Recently, the elite Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru introduced a new mandate for students and researchers, leading to widespread discontent among the scientific community. The department of electronic systems engineering rolled out a new attendance policy requiring MTech and first-year PhD students to spend at least 50 hours a week in laboratories. Senior PhD scholars are expected to match their advisers' 70-80 hour weekly schedules.

Effectively, this amounts to 14-16 hours of study and research daily. The adherence to the rules are to be enforced by Radio Frequency Identification-based access cards and facial recognition devices installed to monitor lab hours.

The system seems to be founded on the ...