China has just overtaken the US in having the maximum number of PhDs enrolled in their universities. And the US last year turned out more than 50,000 PhDs, about 28,000 of them in science and technology. So China is beginning to do better than that! As of last year, China had over 120,000 PhDs enrolled, behind only the US and Germany. We in India had a total of some 375 PhDs graduate last year by one estimate and by no reckoning more than three digits.
The total current PhD enrolment in India is estimated at under 5,000. In computer science and information technology, we produced less than 100 PhDs, with fields such as chemical, electrical and mechanical engineering perhaps together accounting for about the same number. That’s quantity. Quality is another story.
A few years ago, a 1,900-page D Litt thesis in three volumes, submitted by the head of the department of a leading university, landed on my desk for evaluation. I was relieved to find that the magnum opus was not as daunting as it looked at first to plod through, because the volumes contained around 350 tables.
These tables were also reproduced as line diagrams, bar diagrams and pie charts (consuming 350 pages each). For good measure the professor thought it a good idea to use verbal description as well for each table, thus accounting for a good 1,750 pages! Such was the inertia that some of the tables containing some rows of numbers and some rows of ratios were captured in the graphs and charts as if the ratios were numbers! Some of the conclusions were hilarious.
One rare gem, my all time favourite, went something like this, “…of the 2,430 small-scale entrepreneurs interviewed, 1,826 were Hindus, 287 were Muslims, 197 were Christians and 120 were others…” Concluded the dissertation: “This shows the minorities in India are much less entrepreneurial than Hindus”! I shudder to think of the quality of his own PhDs that this HOD may have let loose into the system. On the technology front, I recently interviewed a PhD (with prior teaching experience) in computer science for a faculty position. The gentleman could hardly communicate in English. In fact, increasingly one finds that many of the PhDs, owing to their semi-rural backgrounds, can barely communicate in English.
One wonders how they would carry forward the traditions of scholarship from lecturing to publishing, much of which has to be in English in higher education today. In fact, today, most doctoral students in IITs are from little known engineering colleges and practically none from IITs themselves. Little wonder that the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) was first constrained to relax the PhD requirement in technical education down to a Masters degree and then further down to a mere undergraduate degree for entry-level!
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