New Delhi: India may face shortage of the teaching faculty in higher education because of a sharp fall in the number of students taking up PhD, the main qualification one needs to become a full-time lecturer. Only 2.5% of colleges in the country offer the PhD courses despite the Centre offering funds to encourage research programmes in the academics. Maximum students opt for PhD in Science. A total of 1,69,170 students are currently enrolled in the PhD programmes, which is less than 0.5% of the total student enrolment.
This has been brought out by the HRD Ministry in its all-India survey of higher education. A total of 962 universities, 38,179 colleges and 9190 standalone institutions participated in the survey for the year 2018-19. The share of PhD students is the highest in the state public universities (34.3%), followed by institutes of national importance (21.6%), deemed universities (21.6%) and private universities (13.4%). The report says the number of colleges offering the post graduate courses has also fallen to 34.9%. At the PhD level, maximum students opt for science stream, followed by engineering, while the maximum outturn of students at the PG level is in social sciences, followed by management. "Maximum number of students are enrolled in BA, followed by BSc and BCom courses. At the undergraduate level, the highest number of 35.9% enroll in arts, humanities or social science, followed by 16.5% in science, 14.1% in commerce and 13.5% in engineering.
Since the government has made BEd compulsory for school teachers under the Right to Education (RTI) Act, 38.1% of the colleges that are privately managed run the single course of BEd. There are 34.8% of colleges run only single programme and 83.1% of them are privately managed. The HRD Ministry report also noted that around 16.3% of the colleges have enrollment of less than 100 and only 4% colleges have intake of more than 3,000.
