The All Indian Survey of Higher Education (AISHE) report 2019 today revealed that the number of PhDs has increased by 60 per cent in the last five years. The total PhD admissions increased many folds in the last few years — from 1,26,451 in 2015-16 to 2,02,550 in 2019-20. A total of 38,986 students were awarded PhD degrees during 2019 with 21,577 male and 17,409 female. There are 2,881 students enrolled in Integrated PhD in addition to 2.02 lakh students enrolled for PhD degrees.

However, of the 1043 universities, 42343 colleges and 11779 standalone institutions listed on the AISHE portal, only 2.7 per cent offer PhD programmes and 35.04 per cent of colleges run postgraduate (PG) level programmes. The share of PhD student is highest in the state public universities with 29.8 per cent followed by Institutes of National Importance (INIs) (23.2 per cent), deemed-to-be private universities (13.9 per cent) and central universities (13.6 per cent).

“Though there are 44 central universities, more than half of these were set up after 2009. They are still developing and many of them do not have their permanent campuses to operate from. The reason behind the minuscule percentage of institutes offering PhD degrees is poor funding. Apart from engineering, the research ecosystem in other disciplines lacks infrastructure and required financial support,” said RP Tiwari, vice chancellor, Central University of Punjab.

At the PhD level, the maximum numbers of students are enrolled in the engineering and technology stream followed by science. The engineering and technology stream is divided into 19 sub-streams with a total number of 52478 students enrolled for PhD and 1.77 lakh students at PG level.

Computer engineering has the highest number of 7682 students enrolled for PhD with 57.7 per cent male students. Mechanical engineering is the second-highest, having 6714 students with 91.2 per cent male students.

PhD in foreign languages

There are 5023 students enrolled in PhD in foreign languages. The foreign language stream is divided into five parts and English is at the top of the list. There are 4068 students enrolled in PhD in English with 35 per cent male students and 65 per cent female students. The French language has a total number of 103 students enrolled in PhD, of which 67 per cent are female.

The share of female students is lowest in Institutions of National Importance (INIs) followed by deemed university-government, state private university. The college density, that is, the number of colleges per lakh eligible population (population in the age-group 18-23 years) varies from 7 in Bihar to 59 in Karnataka as compared to All India average of 30.