One of the biggest technical university in India, Anna University, with more than 500 affiliated colleges, to award Ph.D degrees to 1,010 students.
In 2010, a mere 264 Ph.D. scholars got their degrees from the university. After seeing a gradual increase from 1984, when only three PhDs were granted, to 2007 (162), the numbers have gone up steeply. Over the last five years, the number has gone up by more than 282%.
University Vice-Chancellor, M Rajaram said, "We have the highest number of Ph.D. degrees awarded in a convocation by any technical university in India."
The following table shows then number of doctorates come from the various departments.
Department | No of Students |
Information and Communication | 339 |
Humanities | 252 |
Mechanical | 136 |
Electrical | 128 |
Management Science | 73 |
Civil | 41 |
Technology | 38 |
Architecture and Planning | 3 |
Director of the university's Centre for Research Usha Natesan said, "Earlier it could even take 10 months. Now candidates can get their research paper reviewed in three months. This has also helped improve numbers to a large extent."
University has conducted the 35th convocation ceremony on November 05, 2014. A total of 1,41,726 undergraduate (UG) and 42,140 postgraduate students received their degrees.
Professor Anandakrishnan said, "The difference may be in the fact that most of the research scholars in the IITs are full-time committed researchers, compared to a good number of part-time scholars likely to graduate from here. This makes quite a lot of difference."