Grade PhD Theses

That doctoral research in the humanities and social sciences in Indian universities is, by and large, of sub-standard quality is no news. While the intake of doctoral students is rising across the board, the concerned authorities in academia and government are clueless or unmindful as to how to stem the falling standards of research.

On the one hand, democracy demands that the doors of research be thrown wide open to every section of the populace, on the other the pathetic primary and secondary educational standards, coupled with linguistic disability in English and almost non-existent academic oeuvre in the vernaculars in higher education, prepare a contingent of entrants who are ill-equipped to engage in research. Even among those who are fortunate enough to escape this decades-old systemic malfunctioning, quite a few take to research not because they display a bent of mind for research but for extraneous factors ranging from seeking promotion at the workplace to dissembling that they have nothing else to do. Most of the faculty, for their part, seems to have accustomed itself to believing that research is just an extension of teaching–learning that goes on in the classrooms at the graduate level. With job requirements long hinged to formal academic qualifications, the charade in the name of respectability has become all the more widespread.