Public policy and comment on education dwell mainly on school or early college education — very rarely does it touch on the highest end of the barometer: PhDs.

Perhaps we see this as too esoteric or even a luxury in a county where primary education is not available to all. What we need to understand is the educational food chain, where lack of attention to the highest level with ensure that the country’s college-level education doesn’t improve either.

Furthermore, we may not be able to fully tap the opportunity of becoming the R&D centre of major corporations across the world — an opportunity that is increasingly knocking on our door.

Recently, the boom in knowledge-based industries has increased the demand for technical education. This led most states to allow private colleges in the field of technical education — a necessary step as government-aided colleges could not cope with demand.

However, the dramatic rise in private engineering colleges (currently over 1,500 in number) has come at the cost of quality education. Undoubtedly, the key reason for the poor quality of education in these colleges is the poor quality of their faculty.

In most colleges, people with merely undergraduate degrees are allowed to teach, a basic violation of a generally-followed education principle — that the teacher for a degree/class must have acquired a higher level of education or knowledge.

World over, for technical and higher education, teaching faculty with PhDs are preferred. Having a PhD allows a person to have some maturity and provides the ability to keep abreast with current developments — critical to high-quality education, particularly in technical areas where technology and concepts change fast.

In the US, almost all universities require PhDs for their faculty. In Australia, Europe and Japan also all universities require their faculty to have PhDs. 

To satisfy the demand for PhDs, these countries have developed strong and flexible PhD programmes. In Australia, which is not one of the world’s main centres of education, even in an area like computer science or IT about a 100 PhDs a year are produced. And in US, some years back, the number of PhDs graduating in computer science each year was about 1,000.

Contrast this with our situation: the number of PhDs produced each year in computer science is probably no more than 20. This, despite the fact that we now produce more computer science graduates (probably about 100,000) than any other country.

Hence, even if our colleges and universities want to hire PhDs, they are unable to do so.

BESIDES education, there is another reason why we must seriously embark upon programmes to raise the production of PhDs. It’s clear that large corporations, Indian or multinational, are looking at cost-efficient ways of doing R&D and many consider India a good destination. Already MNCs have started R&D centres in India.

If significant growth in R&D starts taking place, the bottleneck will immediately be the availability of PhDs. As no corporation wants to wait too long to ramp up in today’s business climate, if companies don’t find sufficient manpower of good quality, they may decide to take their ventures elsewhere.

Hence, lack of PhDs can easily jeopardise the potential growth of the highest end of industry – R&D. Of course, as our own industry houses become larger and globalise, they will require R&D centres too. And we may find that lack of PhDs might force them to start their centres in other places like China.

The author contacted many organisations that want to grow their R&D activity and almost all have had difficulty finding PhDs for their work. Hence, many of them are now trying to bring NRIs back to India. This, however, is not a reliable strategy — we must produce more PhDs internally.

Increasing the production of PhDs, unfortunately, is a slow process. Even if action is taken now, we will see results only in a few years. To kick-start this process such that quality does not suffer, it is places like the national R&D labs, the IITs, the NITs, and other premier universities that will have to increase their production.

To get going, the top 10 places in each discipline should be identified and a goal to produce 5-10 PhDs each year, in each discipline, should be set. If we can do this, within a few years, with some of the graduates joining educational institutes, the quality of other institutes will improve and they can themselves become centres for producing PhDs.

To support such an initiative, a major ongoing drive and out-of-the-box thinking is needed to recruit more PhD scholars. For example, it will help if we increase our source base and, in addition to fresh graduates, start targeting working people and people who might want to shift from, say, science to engineering. Such options exist in other countries, but in India this avenue is almost closed, particularly in the top institutions.

To encourage working people to pursue PhDs will require a shift in our admissions procedures and degree requirements. First, as these people may be married, to attract them we need to have ‘married student’ fellowships, which are sufficient to support a student and his spouse (and perhaps a child), and provide a suitable HRA, if family accommodation is not provided (they cannot be expected to live in a dormitory).

Another factor that inhibits these people from joining PhD programmes is that they are viewed in the same light as fresh graduates. There is clearly a need to remedy this by viewing experience as equivalent to some courses and waiving certain requirements, if the person possesses relevant experience. Again, foreign universities show this kind of flexibility.

There can be other approaches as well: We can encourage cross-migration with a flexible approach — rather than view the lack of degree in the chosen area of study as a disadvantage, flexibility can be introduced to build upon the existing knowledge.

Scholarships for bright students in their undergraduate education itself, on condition that they enrol in a PhD programme, may be another possibility.

A regular survey that shows the demand for PhDs in different sectors and expected salary levels can help highlight the future prospects of doing a PhD, which may help people make more informed choices. Providing support for PhD scholars to attend international summer schools or workshops can also be beneficial.

If we can embark upon a drive to increase the production of PhDs, we can become a global destinations for education. Without this increase, we stand to miss out on the opportunity of becoming the world’s R&D centre. And, worse still, the poor quality of education in the country will continue.

The Author is a professor of computer science at IIT Kanpur