Recent trends in doctoral education in India

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the recent trends in doctoral education in India in the changing context of higher education in the country. This context is characterised by the gradual withdrawal of state patronage for this level of education and the coterminous rise of the private sector, the formulation and implementation of the national framework for doctoral education in 2016, the adoption of the National Education Policy 2020 by the Government of India, and the devastating effect of the pandemic of coronavirus (Covid-19) since 2020. It focuses on the pattern of enrolment and out-turn of doctoral students, and on the different aspects of doctoral education such as structure, curriculum, supervision, and examination.

KEYWORDS:

• Doctoral enrolment pattern
• doctoral examination
• doctoral supervision
• pre-doctoral course work
• research advisory committee
• UGC regulations 2016

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The massive system of university education in India is also diverse. Broadly, the following types of universities and university level institutions can be delineated: central universities and institutes of national importance, which are established by an Act of the union Parliament; state universities, which are established by an Act of State Assemblies and are funded by the State Governments; private universities, which are established by an Act of State Government; government Institutions and government-aided institutions Deemed to be University by the University Grants Commission (UGC; see En 3); and private institutions Deemed to be University by the UGC.

2. The data for 2019–20 come from the All India Survey of Higher Education (AISHE) (GoI, 2020a). They relate to 1,019 universities or university-level institutions (hereafter universities), 39955 colleges, and 9,599 stand-alone institutions (of the total of 1,043 universities, 42343 colleges, and 11,779 stand-alone institutions in the country) which had voluntarily provided the necessary data.

3. The data on the under-representation of candidates belonging to the reserved categories in the institutes of national importance were presented by the Minister of Education in Rajya Sabha (the upper house of the Indian Parliament) on 4 February 2021 (see Hindustan Times, Mumbai, 7 February 2021, https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/mumbai-news/very-few-phd-students-in-top-indian-institutes-from-sc-st-category-data -101,612,721,331,846html (accessed 8 October 2022).

4. UGC is a statutory organisation, established by an Act of Parliament in 1956, that is responsible for the coordination, determination, and maintenance of standards of teaching, examination, and research in university education.

5. The National Education Policy 2020 has proposed that candidates intending to enrol in a doctoral programme must have either a master’s degree or a four-year bachelor’s degree with a research component (Government of India GoI, 2020b, p. 38). Since, many universities have introduced the four-year bachelor’s degree programme since the academic year 2022–23, the first batch of candidates with revised eligibility requirements will be enrolled starting with the academic year 2027–28.

6. The 2016 UGC regulations prescribe the number of scholars a supervisor can supervise at any given time: Professor up to eight, an associate professor, up to six, and an assistant professor up to four. It is mandatory in some universities that the supervisor enrols at least one or two doctoral scholars from indigent sections of the society referred to earlier.

7. This inadvertently led to the proliferation of publications in on-line and predatory journals. To address this, in November 2019, the UGC instituted a ‘Reference List of Quality Journals’, called the ‘UGC Care List’. Finding that most of the publications were not in Scopus-indexed journals, the UGC has since withdrawn the mandatory requirement of paper publication prior to thesis submission.

8. INFLIBNET (Information and Library Network) is an autonomous Inter-University Centre of the UGC. Its website, https://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/, is an open-access platform under Creative Commons for doctoral degree holders to deposit an electronic copy of their thesis.

Additional information

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes on contributors

Narayana Jayaram

Narayana Jayaram retired as Professor of Research Methodology at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. His recent publications on doctoral education in India include chapters in The Making of Doctoral Supervisors (edited by Stan Taylor et al), and Doctoral Examination (edited by Vijay Kumar et al.).