Prof R.K. Uppal
India is producing PhDs at an unprecedented scale. Enrolments have nearly tripled, rising from about 1.17 lakh in 2014-15 to 3.44 lakh in 2023-24, according to the All India Survey on Higher Education. The number of degrees awarded has also climbed, from roughly 22,000 a decade ago to nearly 38,000 in recent years, with more than three lakh doctorates conferred over the period. On paper, this looks like a research renaissance. In reality, it reveals a deeper problem: the country is generating credentials faster than it is building genuine research capacity, career pathways, or scholarly impact. India does not primarily need more PhDs. It needs fewer, but markedly stronger ones.
The expansion has been driven by policy signals and institutional incentives. The National Education Policy 2020 and the National Institutional Ranking Framework placed research output at the centre of institutional prestige. Faculty promotions and rankings reward publications and doctoral supervision numbers. Many universities, including under-resourced state and private institutions, launched or expanded PhD programmes, sometimes treating them as revenue streams through self-funded or part-time candidates. The result is a swollen pipeline. Yet completion rates remain uneven, supervision quality varies sharply, and the system is filling the doctoral ranks far faster than it clears them into meaningful roles.
The research paradox is stark. India ranks among the top three countries in the sheer volume of scientific publications. Between 2020 and 2025, Indian researchers produced an extraordinary volume of Scopus-indexed papers. Publication growth has been dramatic in universities, engineering, pharmacy and management. India’s global share of research output has risen. Citations and influence tell a different story. The country’s h-index lags far behind leaders; it ranks far lower on impact metrics than on raw output. A significant share of papers attracts little attention, international collaboration rates trail those of peer nations, and retraction rates have risen. The pressure to publish has, in too many places, encouraged quantity over originality, sometimes feeding predatory or low-quality journals. Patents filed by universities have increased, yet conversion into commercialized technologies or societal solutions remains limited. Volume without depth does not build a knowledge economy.The mismatch extends beyond publications into careers. A PhD is meant to train independent researchers. In India, many graduates face weak postdoctoral ecosystems, delayed faculty recruitment and limited research-intensive industry roles. Government-funded postdoc positions number only in the low thousands. Faculty vacancies persist even at premier institutes—around 38 per cent of sanctioned posts across 23 IITs were reported vacant in recent analysis—while stipends during doctoral study remain modest compared with private-sector starting salaries. Many scholars spend five or six years on fellowships that barely match entry-level industry pay, only to find academic positions scarce, recruitment slow, or industry treating the doctorate as “no experience.” The result is underutilization of talent, skill mismatch and continued brain drain of the strongest researchers to better-funded systems abroad. Producing doctorates without absorbing them into productive research or teaching roles wastes both public investment and individual potential.
“India must move beyond the mass production of doctoral degrees towards a research system that prioritizes quality, originality, and global relevance. A PhD should represent intellectual independence, rigorous investigation, and a meaningful contribution to knowledge—not merely an academic qualification. Achieving this transformation requires qualified supervisors, transparent evaluation, robust research ethics, adequate funding, and greater institutional accountability. Universities must discourage repetitive research, plagiarism, and the pursuit of degrees for career advancement alone. Doctoral education should address real-world challenges, strengthen innovation, and influence public policy. India needs fewer but stronger PhDs to build a credible, competitive, and globally respected research ecosystem.”
Root causes are structural. Supervisor-to-scholar ratios are often stretched. Some institutions allow heavy loads that make rigorous mentoring impossible. Admission standards and coursework quality differ widely. Part-time and executive PhD routes, while useful in principle, have sometimes diluted expectations. Funding is inadequate and unevenly disbursed; many NET-qualified candidates receive no fellowship. Research infrastructure—labs, libraries, databases, fieldwork support—remains thin outside a handful of elite institutions. Metrics that count papers and enrolments more heavily than citations, patents that are used or real-world problem-solving reinforce the wrong incentives. When doctoral programmes become degree factories rather than apprenticeships in original inquiry, quality erodes.
A stronger PhD system would look different. Admission should be highly selective and transparent, based on demonstrated research aptitude rather than the mere ability to pay fees or clear a minimal threshold. Supervisor limits must be enforced and mentoring quality monitored. Coursework should emphasize research methods, ethics, critical thinking and interdisciplinary problem formulation. Fellowships need to be more adequate, reliably paid and expanded so that full-time research is viable. Postdoctoral positions and research careers outside pure academia—in industry R&D, policy, public-sector laboratories and startups—must be deliberately built. Evaluation should shift from counting publications to assessing originality, methodological rigour, reproducibility and societal or technological relevance. Institutions should be rewarded for impact and integrity, not merely throughput. Negative marking for retractions in rankings is a start; broader quality-adjusted metrics are needed.
India’s challenges in climate adaptation, public health, semiconductors, artificial intelligence, agriculture and inclusive growth demand researchers who can generate usable knowledge, not merely degrees. A smaller cohort of rigorously trained, well-supported doctoral scholars, working in environments that value depth and integrity, will contribute more than a larger cohort of thinly supervised candidates chasing publication counts. Premier institutions already demonstrate that high-quality doctoral training is possible; the task is to raise the floor across the system rather than simply expanding the ceiling of enrolments. The choice is not between quantity and ambition. Ambition requires quality. India has shown it can scale doctoral education rapidly. The harder, more necessary task is to slow the rush toward numbers and invest in standards, supervision, funding and careers that turn PhDs into genuine researchers. Fewer but stronger doctorates will serve the country’s knowledge needs far better than the current boom.
(The author is Principal, Guru Gobind Singh College of Management and Technology, Gidderbaha, Punjab. The views, opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the author and aren’t necessarily in accord with the views of “Kashmir Horizon”)
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