Dear Prof. Kakodkar,
As I could not find any other way to communicate with you, I am writing this comment. I apologize.
Sir, you are keen on enhancing the PhD research quality at IITs. I am trying to draw your attention to one particular aspect – The fees that PhD scholars need to pay at the IITs and the scholarship that they receive.
At IITs our students pay quite hefty fees when compared to other academic institutions such as IISc, the DBT, DST, CSIR, DAE laboratories etc. This amount may be small for some of us but for a student earning only Rs. 16,000 – 18,000 per month this is a sizable amount.
At IITs PhD scholars are paid full stipends only for 4 or 5 years of their tenure. This is wrong on several counts:
A. The duration has been decided long time back and may no longer be valid. One should calculate the average duration of PhD tenure at an IIT and decide the optimal time required. A PhD student should be paid full scholarship for that period of time.
B. For extending the program only the students get penalized and no one else. Is it always their fault? Sometimes tenures are extended as an equipment is out of order or the final/critical experiment is too difficult or some key reagents are missing or the thesis supervisor is indisposed and cannot provide his/her input for the thesis and so on. It is not justified to always penalize the student for the extension of the tenure.
My plea to you is please look into these aspects. It may be a small issue but from interaction with PhD students I can assure you that this is a significant issue.
My request would be that students are paid full scholarships for the average duration of PhD tenure (which I am sure is longer than 4-5 years) and pay minimum fees. We need to distinguish PhD scholars from other students. PhD scholars are our colleagues and should be treated as such.
I apologize in advance if I have exceeded my brief but I desperately wanted to draw your attention to these issues. There is a possibility that such positive steps, along with enhanced scholarships for a selected few (which you recently proposed) will help attract better students to IITs. Currently the level of competition among institutes for good PhD scholars is very high and every little incentive is likely to help.
Dear Prof. Kakodkar,
As I could not find any other way to communicate with you, I am writing this comment. I apologize.
Sir, you are keen on enhancing the PhD research quality at IITs. I am trying to draw your attention to one particular aspect – The fees that PhD scholars need to pay at the IITs and the scholarship that they receive.
At IITs our students pay quite hefty fees when compared to other academic institutions such as IISc, the DBT, DST, CSIR, DAE laboratories etc. This amount may be small for some of us but for a student earning only Rs. 16,000 – 18,000 per month this is a sizable amount.
At IITs PhD scholars are paid full stipends only for 4 or 5 years of their tenure. This is wrong on several counts:
A. The duration has been decided long time back and may no longer be valid. One should calculate the average duration of PhD tenure at an IIT and decide the optimal time required. A PhD student should be paid full scholarship for that period of time.
B. For extending the program only the students get penalized and no one else. Is it always their fault? Sometimes tenures are extended as an equipment is out of order or the final/critical experiment is too difficult or some key reagents are missing or the thesis supervisor is indisposed and cannot provide his/her input for the thesis and so on. It is not justified to always penalize the student for the extension of the tenure.
My plea to you is please look into these aspects. It may be a small issue but from interaction with PhD students I can assure you that this is a significant issue.
My request would be that students are paid full scholarships for the average duration of PhD tenure (which I am sure is longer than 4-5 years) and pay minimum fees. We need to distinguish PhD scholars from other students. PhD scholars are our colleagues and should be treated as such.
I apologize in advance if I have exceeded my brief but I desperately wanted to draw your attention to these issues. There is a possibility that such positive steps, along with enhanced scholarships for a selected few (which you recently proposed) will help attract better students to IITs. Currently the level of competition among institutes for good PhD scholars is very high and every little incentive is likely to help.
With warm regards,
Amitabha