Roll back deferment of scholarship to PhD, MTech students

Ground Report | News Desk | Research scholars has request to instruct NIT Hamirpur and Jalandhar administration to roll back its decision regarding deferment of monthly fellowship/scholarship to PhD/MTech students an association of researchers, the Joint Research Council of India said. JRCI strongly condemns the aforesaid notifications and strongly believe Ministry of Education will definitely take up positive actions to boost research atmosphere in India and instruct to roll back decision regarding deferment of monthly fellowship/scholarship to PhD/MTech students.

According to JRCI the new PhD admissions NIT Jalandhar asked the students to submit the form where it was clearly written that the student has to undertake that the institute offers student’s admission under PhD (Full-time) Programme without any institute Scholarship/Stipend during the entire duration of his/her PhD degree.

India, a land where most ancient knowledge started, is contemporarily spending less than 1% of its GDP on research whereas the expenditure of average world GDP is around 2-3% on research.

Vikrant Singh, a research scholar of IIT Guwahati and President of Joint Research Council of India said "JRCI are anguished with the latest developments in Academia. Several institutions are unscrupulously coercing their PhD scholars to forfeit their fellowship. Many of the scholars come from marginalized background, and are struggling to pursue their academic career".

5 Hollywood Celebrities Who Changed Their Religion to become hindus

He added Moreover, almost all are facing hardships in these covid pandemic situation. The vision that our leaders have seen India as “Vishwa guru” cannot be achieved if we as a nation will not invest in research aggressively. Furthermore, most research scholars selflessly make us proud with their knowledge level and excellence in their respective field with whatever little infrastructure we have. As a researcher, we have only fellowship which supports our research and family. Several researchers are waiting to make India Proud and could not do it without proper government support. "We bring this to your notice that, during this time of crisis, research scholars of our India, wholeheartedly support their institutes for the peaceful commencement of online classes of all UG students, and parallelly, they are indulged with their research work too".

"In such a time, some institutions are forcing their new entrants and applicants to submit an undertaking with clearly written directive of their fellowship being forfeited. Is it not bonded labour? These students will face dual hardships, they have to dedicate themselves with as such no incentives from the government, or the institution. Does this not break their belief in the society? They asked. Indian Government is allowing each industrial sector and institutions to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic financial crunch through different relief packages. However, when the education sector comes into picture, some institutional administrators are literally killing the research atmosphere as these young scholars are future of scientific community of India, and they are being marginalized citing fund crunch. When the Institutions are extravagantly spending public money on not so worthy affairs. These only shows their priorities" He added.

JRCI said in it's statement "If no action been taken to retract the office order of NIT HAMIRPUR, and NIT JALANDHAR, these will be a trend in academia to overlook the needs of scholars, and it will setup a disastrous bias towards young scholars community in general".

Henceforth, we have written to Government to intervene, and order these institutions to change their policies, and attitude at large which is against scientific culture of the country.

The research quality in India’s top institutions like IIT, NIT and IIITs are getting tapered in past few years, whereas countries like China and Israel have boosted their research quality and also initiated new research grants. The Ministry of Education should be aware of this and instead of initiating new research grants and funds they are snatching the existing funds from Indian Research Scholars.

You can connect with Ground Report on Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp, and mail us at [email protected] to send us your suggestions and writeups.