The Ministry of Human Resource Development has decided to extend the Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship to science and technology graduates from any university in the country for admission into full-time PhD programmes. It was earlier restricted only to graduates from the IITs, IISc, IISERs, NITs and centrally-funded IIITs.
The fellowship, announced in February this year to widespread pushback, grants between Rs 70,000 and Rs 80,000 per month to scholars apart from an annual Rs 2 lakh grant to pursue a PhD in the select institutions.
The decision to expand the scope of the fellowship was taken at the recently concluded National Conference of Vice-Chancellors, according to a Deccan Herald report. The ministry is soon expected to release a notification in this regard.
While the eligibility criteria also requires that applicants secure a CGPA/CPI of at least 8.0 (on a scale of 10), it is unclear whether this will be altered as well.
The decision was taken because of growing demand from students and calls to expand its scope from various stakeholders, Deccan Herald reported.
Launching the scheme, HRD minister Prakash Javadekar said the fellowship would attract more engineering graduates from the centrally-funded institutions to pursue an M Tech or a PhD, boosting research. Producing qualified teachers to meet the shortage of faculty members in higher educational institutions in the country was also a stated aim. He said the scheme would turn “brain drain” into “brain gain”. It received an allocation of Rs 1,650 crore in the budget for the first seven years.
However, the fellowship has not sailed smoothly. It was supposed to aid 1,000 scholars in the first year but only 135 students were selected. According the Indian Express, the low intake was due to “stringent selection procedures”. “This is the first year of the fellowship and the IITs and IISc set the bar really high for screening candidates. We want the brightest minds for this fellowship. The response is expected to improve with each passing year,” the report said, quoting a senior official.
The expansion of the scheme to science and technology graduates from all Indian universities is expected to help increase the intake.
Earlier this month, The Wire had reported that by limiting the fellowship to “elite institutions”, the fund was adding to the layers of privilege that already assail Indian academia.
The 1,800 students who had applied from this pool of candidates were those who had already cleared many levels of implicit selection. An analysis of the student composition of IITs shows that not all economic and social backgrounds have equal representation in these elite institutions.