HRD Ministry plans to admit bright B.Tech. students straight into PhD

HRD Ministry has come up with a unique initiative to sort out the issue of scarcity of faculty in IITs. The ministry is going to introduce a research scholar scheme under which it plans to choose 1,000 talented BTech students from reputed engineering colleges across the country and admit them directly into PhD programmes. The HRD Ministry is planning to propose the aforementioned scheme during the IIT Council next week.

According to Times of India report, the sources of the HRD Ministry would ask the IITs if it is possible to choose intelligent BTech students and admit them directly into PhD i.e. soon after completion of BTech. There are also plans to look at the possibilities of enrolling BTech passouts from IITs with job experience and interest in research into PhD.

A ministry official was quoted saying that all these plans have been chalked out in order to solve the problem of lack of faculty in IITs. The official further said that even though the IITs produce about 2,000 PhDs every year, the number of vacancies are always the same. The aim of the scheme mentioned above is to improve the quality of PhD and motivate talented IIT students to take up to research because IITs stress more on qualitaty teachers. The government is ready to provide good amount of scholarships to attract BTech students to do PhD.

According to the report on IITs submitted by Anil Kakodkar Committee, "each IIT should have around 1,200 faculty (from around 500 at present) and around 12,000 students with maximum growth coming from an enhanced number of PhD students. A minimum of 0.6 PhDs per faculty annually, consequently reaching 1 PhD per faculty. Based on this, the IIT system should consist of 16,000 faculty and 1,60,000 students (with 40,000 at the PhD level, 40,000 at the Masters level and 80,000 UG students) by 2020".

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