INDIA - Mandatory PhD for university posts postponed due to pandemic

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20211007144120430

Shuriah Niazi  07 October 2021

India’s Ministry of Education has postponed its plan to make PhD qualifications a mandatory requirement this year for the appointments of assistant professors – the entry level position for academics aiming to become professors in public research universities. The reason is disruption suffered by doctoral students due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said on 29 September: “The PhD requirement is being temporarily waived to open up the post to more candidates and fill vacancies.”

Pradhan continued: “Several candidates who could not fulfil the PhD requirement had demanded the ministry suspend the 2018 guidelines that make PhD essential for teaching at university level for the entry-level designation of assistant professor.”

In 2018 the ministry allowed a three-year window for candidates to finish their PhDs and told all higher education institutions to require a doctorate qualification for appointments from the 2021-22 academic year starting on 1 July.

However, many students could not complete their PhDs in the stipulated three-year period due to closures of universities, libraries and laboratories, and travel restrictions during the pandemic, and they sought deferral of the PhD requirement.

A PhD requirement is a global standard for quality teaching at the higher education level and many countries are attempting to upgrade teaching quality by making it a minimum requirement for those on track to become tenured professors.

The Ministry of Education said it had had relaxed the requirement – temporarily – to allow higher education institutions to fill vacant posts. Candidates who qualified under the National Eligibility Test (NET), a competitive exam administered by the University Grants Commission (UGC) for scholars with masters degrees, will continue to be eligible to apply for the post of assistant professor, the ministry stated.

NET is the minimum qualification for Indian nationals for posts in publicly funded colleges and teaching below undergraduate level in universities, to ensure minimum standards for those entering the teaching profession and research.

Every year thousands of students in India sit this examination to become an assistant professor or junior research fellow. Candidates with at least 55% marks in their masters degree are eligible to sit the NET. The test is conducted twice a year in humanities (including languages), social sciences, forensic science, environmental sciences, computer science and electronic science.

An official of the apex regulatory body, the UGC, noted some ambiguity over when the compulsory requirement could be notified. In view of the pandemic, it looked like the PhD as an entry level requirement would have to be postponed for a year or two, although the matter was still under consideration at the UGC, he said.

Vacant posts

About 10,000 teaching and non-teaching posts are vacant in elite centrally funded universities alone, and the situation is even more alarming in universities funded by state governments. This is in part due to increases in enrolment in higher education as the government pushes its goal of greater higher education access.

Academics say the problem of faculty shortages has persisted for a long time and institutions have appointed large numbers of part-time or ad hoc faculty to ensure continuation of courses and programmes as the number of students entering universities rises.

Dr Dheeraj Sanghi, vice-chancellor of JK Lakshmipat University, a private institution in Jaipur in Rajasthan, said experimental research had taken a back seat during the past 18 months and there was a need to allow those without PhDs to teach.

“There is a severe shortage of PhDs in India. If we have to look at the higher education system everybody would have to have a PhD. But I think it may take decades to produce that many PhDs.

“It’s a good idea to let the universities decide whether they want to hire a PhD or a non-PhD candidate,” he told University World News.

The number of students pursuing higher education has been increasing as the gross enrolment ratio (GER) in higher education in India touched 27.1% for 2019-20, up from the previous year’s 26.3%, according to the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2019-20 report released in June 2021. The GER was 25.2% in 2016.

GER is the ratio of enrolment in higher education to the population in the 18-23 year age group. The AISHE report also revealed that total enrolment in higher education was 38.5 million in 2019-20, compared to 37.4 million in 2018-19.

Academics say the number of teachers has not increased corresponding to the number of students.

“Whether it’s private [university] expansion or public expansion, this expansion is needing more faculty,” Sanghi said, adding that growth has been very high for the last 10 to 15 years. “In the government sector also, we have seen a lot of new Indian Institutes of Technology, central universities, state level universities and so on.”

Quality issues

Pankaj Mittal, secretary general of the Association of Indian Universities, said the decision to postpone was in view of an unprecedented COVID situation. She believed that with the NET in place, changing the requirement will not have implications for the quality of teaching and research.

"It’s not that both conditions are waived,” she told University World News, referring to the NET as a qualifier within the country.

Until now there was no compulsory PhD requirement, she said. “In 2020-21 it was to be introduced for the first time so it will only be a delayed implementation by one year,” she said, adding that it was decided “in the interest of students who want to become [university] teachers”.

Delhi University Teachers’ Association President Rajib Ray also said temporarily suspending the requirement will not have implications for the quality of teaching. “Whether good or bad, it [teaching] has been continuing, and these are teachers who have produced good students for so long.

“If they are good in teaching at undergraduate colleges all over the country, why will it affect teaching quality if they teach the same things and at the most there will be [people with] a masters degree in a few departments.” A PhD alone cannot be a yardstick for quality, he told University World News.

Besides, said Ray of early career lecturers: “If you stop them from teaching, then who will teach?”