New Delhi, Dec. 23: Doing a PhD in India will soon get tougher: the Centre is set to introduce stricter screening to regulate the quality of research produced by students.

The new regulations will be unveiled in a notification on the revised pay regime for college and university teachers the government plans to publish soon, The Telegraph has learnt.

PhD (doctoral degree) holders are automatically qualified to teach in Indian higher education institutions. All others have to clear either the National Eligibility Test (NET) or the State Eligibility Tests (SETs).

The move to introduce stricter quality checks on PhDs comes at a time the government is ready to roll out unprecedented pay packages for teachers.

It also follows a slew of complaints the human resource development ministry has received alleging the grant of PhDs without adequate rigour at various institutions.

“There is no free lunch. We are paying young entrants to teaching more than even civil servants who clear the IAS. But we need to make our quality checks stricter,” an official said.

An entrant to the civil services gets a take-home salary of around Rs 24,000 a month since the implementation of the sixth pay commission recommendations.

A PhD holder entering teaching will receive at least Rs 27,000 a month under the new salary regime based on the recommendations of a UGC review panel.

Some institutions allow students to select their supervisors, a practice that must stop once the notification is published, sources said.

The new rules include strict guidelines on the number of PhD degrees an institution can award in a year.

The number will depend on how many faculty members are qualified to supervise doctoral research.

Institutions will also have to conduct pre-advertised entrance tests to select PhD scholars and put them through at least one semester of course work before they begin their dissertation.

The regulations lay down strict conditions that scho- lars have to follow after registration to the PhD programme, if they are to receive the degree.

Sources said the notification might introduce some curbs on the practice of granting PhDs through distance learning.

Many top universities already follow these regulations. But officials said the government had been flooded with complaints over the past two years that degrees were being granted without adequate rigour.

A review committee under Bhalchandra Mungekar, member, Planning Commission, earlier this year recommended that students with MPhil be exempted from qualifying the NET to teach at higher educational institutions. It said the exemption for PhD holders should continue.

But the UGC pay review panel, headed by G.K. Chadha, a former vice-chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, disagreed.

MPhil holders could not be exempted, it said. PhD holders could be exempted, but only if the government and educational institutions strengthened norms to scrutinise work by research scholars.