The Centre has directed the IITs to pull up their socks on PhD backlogs and recommended actions against supervisors for greater accountability.
However, several academics have pinned the delay in the completion of research on the government’s policy of promoting output without due regard for quality.
Last month, higher education secretary Vineet Joshi is learnt to have written to all IIT directors about the huge PhD backlog, as revealed by data collected by the education ministry.
IIT students get an assistantship or a fellowship while pursuing research. They are entitled to the assistantship for four years, which is extendable for another year. The rules allow them to complete their PhD within seven years, failing which they can’t continue at the institute. However, the students are expected to complete their doctoral research within five years.
Joshi is learnt to have underscored how a large number of students were unable to wrap up their research within five years despite help from artificial intelligence.
Sources in multiple IITs said Joshi had asked the institutes to reduce the number of PhD slots assigned to faculty members who were failing to help students deliver excellent research output within the five-year timeline. He also asked the IITs to review PhD programmes and identify the reasons behind significant pendency.
Former NIT Rourkela director Sunil Sarangi attributed the delay to the government’s policy of promoting “sub-standard research for increased output”. “This is an external manifestation of an internal malaise. The government has, over the years, oriented the institutions to produce more PhDs, without adequate stress on quality,” Sarangi said.
He cited the example of the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), which awards higher scores to institutions producing more research scholars and publications. The promotion of faculty members is also linked to the number of publications, not their quality.
“The IITs are consciously driven by these metrics and have been focused on increasing the number of PhDs and publications,” Sarangi said.
He said the IITs had been offering specialised PhD programmes designed for working professionals, irrespective of profession. In the first few decades of their establishment, the IITs only offered regular PhD programmes. The part-time PhD facility was available only to faculty members. Working executives were not allowed to pursue a PhD because it was assumed they were unlikely to put in the required rigour for research.
“Now anybody can pursue an executive or part-time
PhD. These candidates have regular jobs. They have their own obligations. They delay the completion of the research, and their work is poor,” Sarangi said.
“Faculty members have started publishing in sub-standard journals, too, to meet the requirement of a certain number of publications for promotion. These output-centric policies proposed by some academics and pursued by the government have harmed teaching and research,” Sarangi said.
Prof. Rajeev Kumar, former faculty member of IIT Kharagpur, said a three-to-five-year period was sufficient to complete a “world-class PhD”, provided both the supervisor and the student worked full-time and with complete focus. He blamed the delay on inadequate facilities, poor coordination between supervisors and students and competing priorities.
Former vice-chancellor of the Central University of South Bihar, Prof. Janak Pandey, said some students nurtured career objectives different from their research.
“There are some students who get busy preparing for the civil services exam after admission into PhD programmes. They fail to focus on doctoral programmes and are more likely to delay the submission of theses. The other group of students continues in the programme, sometimes beyond five years, to contribute to the research work of their professor and get co-authorship on publications,” Pandey said.
Prof. V Ramgopal Rao, vice-chancellor of BITS Pilani and former director of IIT Delhi, said delays in PhD completion were more common in experimental and laboratory-intensive areas, where progress depended on equipment uptime, process optimisation and repeated trials. “High-end research facilities require constant maintenance, and even minor breakdowns or procurement delays can set experimental work back by several months. In many cases, students also depend on shared facilities, which adds further scheduling constraints,” he said.