The cabinet has lately cleared the Prime Minister’s Research Fellows (PMRF) scheme in a bid to stop intellectuals from leaving the country to pursue research.This can be seen as a welcome and long-pending initiative to end the curse of India-born brains adding to intellectual property and groundbreaking research and innovation of other countries.
The Scheme
Indeed, this time incentives to take up research are high.
- Beginning from 2018-19, 1,000 students will be granted fellowship every year under PMRF,and this comes with lucrative monetary perks. INR 70,000 is the monthly amount that will be paid to selected fellows for the initial two years, and this will rise to INR 75,000 per month in the 3rd year and INR 80,000 per month in the last two years.
- Alongside, there exists a separate research grant of INR 2 lakh that is targeted to cover expenses of the fellow for participation in international research eventsany time while being enrolled in the 5-year fellowship.
- What’s more? Even if one cannot make it to the final list of selected fellows in the current year, the scheme will be active for admission of 1,000 new fellows each year for next two financial years.
Selection criterion
The framework speaks of direct admission of selected 1,000 students in Ph.D.programmesof IITs and IISc. The selection criterion isas below;
- One should have completed or is in the final year of B.Tech or integrated M.Tech or M.Sc. in the disciplines of science and technology at NIT, IISER, IIIT, IIT or IISc.
- Minimum CGPA (cumulative grade point average) for getting shortlisted in the PMRF scheme is set at 8.5.
Why India needs this scheme?
Having mentioned the broad contours of the scheme, let us also look at the coin from the other side. India still spends less than 1 percent of GDP on research, and we haven’t produced scientists and researchers commensurate with the total population and the intellectual edge we possess.Still, of all the scientists employed with world’s leading science and technology firms, such as NASA, a good percentage comprises of Indians.
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) has gripped the public imagination and are the forever drivers of economic growth. For India to surpass the US and other European countries not only do we need more spending on hard power elements like defense, but we also need the competitive edge in the industry and precisely, intellectual property rights.
PMRF then is the right step in the right direction.
Author’s view
Our higher education institutions, comprising of IITs and NITs among others, have fared badly in global rankings. The Ph.D.programme that is to be offered to PMRF fellows over the next three years has to be brought at par with standards followed by institutes like Harvard in the US and the University of Tokyo (it boasts of 7 Nobel Prize laureates as alumni) in Japan.
The Ministry of Human Resource Development can consider partnering with institutes like MIT, Cambridge or Oxford to close the gap. Together with increasing the amount paid to fellows, we now have to enhance how research is pursued.
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