During my recent visits to several technological institutes in India I noticed that Computational Biology/Bioinformatics (CB/B) as a strong field of research faces hesitancy in acceptance from both CS as well as Biology/Biotech departments across the country. The CS departments do not consider this field as part of "classical" computer science, while the Biology/Biotech departments feel there is no experimental work involved and biology cannot be studied in silico.
One of the primary reasons for this reluctance is that we are not fundamentally trained to think "inter-disciplinarily". Beginning from schooling there is an inherent divide among the students of Sciences - most, if not all, students during their Std. XII get divided into either the 'engineering' or the 'medicine or life sciences' categories. Those good in mathematics and physics incline towards 'engineering', while those good in biology tend to incline towards 'medicine' or 'life sciences'. There is nothing wrong in this division; in fact at some time or the other during schooling a student has to decide on a future path to pursue. But, the problem lies in the fact that (usually) engineers are not interested in (and are not encouraged to learn) biology, and medical doctors/life scientists are not interested in (and are not encouraged to learn) mathematics/computer science. This bias is unhealthy and is created by the educational system which does not imbibe or encourage any bit of cross-faculty or 'out of the scope' studies in either factions. This basic divide right from schooling causes inter-disciplinary fields like CB/B to face hesitancy in acceptance. The research (PhD) students who get accepted into CS departments feel CB/B involves learning biology, while those accepted into biology departments feel it involves learning mathematics and 'computer programming', and both factions are hesistant about learning subjects our of their areas of comfort.
Another reason for the lack of acceptance of this field in India is the lack of proper understanding of the field itself in India. CB/B is considered more of an "informatics support" to life sciences rather than an independent research field in its own right. Most life sciences research institutes in India only have a "bioinformatics support" group comprising of a few IT people who look after the computer and software systems required for life sciences researchers - such as databases, web servers, softwares, etc. At the most, some bioinformatics "research" groups develop databases and web servers hosting biological data, which accounts to nothing more than storing data coming from the associated wet labs into databases and making these data 'queryable' from the Web. Even the mushoorming MSc programmes in CB/B in many universities across India only teach how to use popular softwares such as BLAST or ClustalW, and do not teach how to model biological systems and tackle biological problems using mathematics, computer science and statistics. Teachers as well as students do not realize that CB/B has the capability to drive or provide crucial leads to life sciences research, which can not only reduce experimental time and costs but also improve the quality of the results, all of which is aimed towards new discoveries in biology and medicine.
I also noticed that the only evolved computational research in life sciences in India is structural biology. The reason is partly traditional - India has traditionally been quite strong in photonics with many reknowned scientists like C V Raman having worked and contributed to it, and structural biology involves X-ray crystallography, electron microscopy and tomography, and other physics of light (photonics) to understand the 3D structures of biomolecules such as proteins. With the advent of computers, many of the complex computations in structural biology are now being implemented using computers, which requires algorithmic development and implementation. This has attracted some computer science and mathematics into solving biological problems. Some notable structural biology research groups are Prof Srinivasan's group at IISc, Soudhamini's group at NCBS, Gromiha's group at IIT Madras, Jayaram's and Sundar's groups at IIT Delhi, and Anand's group at IIT Guwahati, to name a few. However, even with these efforts India is still lagging a lot behind in this field compared to rest of the researching world.
Computational Biology/Bioinformatics is a vast unexplored field of research, even from the point of view of computer science - quoting Donald Knuth, it has at least 500 years of problems for computer scientists to work on! One way to promote this field would be to encourage CB/B research groups in technological institutes both as part of CS as well as biology departments and to allow collaborations among them. The key is to give enough freedom to researchers to pursue 'non-classical' areas of research - biological studies in CS departments and computational studies in biology departments. There should be no pressure on the researchers to constantly justify to their respective departments what they are doing is still valuable and important.
As more and more people in India start exploring this exciting field, and more and more Indians researching abroad start returning back, I am sure this field will catch up in India.
Before I finish, I would like to recommend two relevant readings here by David B. Searls published in PLoS Comp Bio,
The roots of bioinformatics
Ten simple rules to choose between industry and academia (in bioinformatics)
