PhD cant now be endless research
PhD cant now be endless research
Soon, PhD scholars in the country cannot endlessly carry on elusive research without submitting their thesis for years.

Soon, PhD scholars in the country cannot endlessly carry on elusive research without submitting their thesis for years.

Taking a serious view of the decline in quality of PhD thesis and procrastination by research scholars in completing their work, a University Grants Commission (UGC) expert committee has recommended that the duration for PhD programme be restricted to five years.

The committee headed by former University of Madras Vice Chancellor S P Thyagarajan, who is himself a well-known scientific researcher, has also proposed restrictions on the number of scholars a research supervisor can guide at a given point of time. The UGC (Minimum Standards and Procedure for Award of MPhil/PhD Degrees) Regulations 2012, as and when notified, would supercede the UGC Regulations of 2009.

As per the proposed new regulations, “MPhil programme shall be for a minimum duration of two consecutive semesters and a maximum of four consecutive semesters. PhD programmes shall be for a minimum duration of six consecutive semesters and a maximum of 10 consecutive semesters”. In other words, a student enrolling for MPhil degree course must complete it within two years and a PhD scholar cannot drag his/her research beyond five years.

Those pursuing MPhil or PhD on a part-time basis will get an additional year to complete their course.

Explaining the rationale behind the recommendation, Thyagarajan said, “Some research scholars continue to work on their thesis for 10 to 12 years by when the topic of research becomes old and unworthy. We wanted to put in a quality yardstick so that there will be some seriousness in  the approach of the PhD candidates as well as their research supervisors.”

Likewise, research supervisors would be barred from guiding more than five MPhil and eight PhD candidates at a time. “Nowadays some research supervisors take pride in saying that they had guided 60 to 70 PhD candidates by lending their names as guides for those pursuing PhD through distance education mode also. Even in colleges, research supervisors are claiming to guide 20 to 25 candidates at a time. This is unhealthy and leads     to dilution in quality of guidance given to the research  scholars,” Thyagarajan explained.

The committee has also  recommended that only candidates who have completed  MPhil with a 55 per cent aggregate score (50 per cent for SC/STs) would be eligible to pursue PhD.

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