Students from all univs can soon apply for PM fellowship

NEWDELHI: Students from all universities will be allowed to apply for the Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship (PMRF) under which ₹70,000 per month is given to a student apart from a research grant of ₹2 lakh per year. So far the scheme was restricted to IISC, IITS, NITS, IISERS, centrally funded IIITS. The decision that all students will be eligible for the fellowship subject to certain conditions for admission to full-time PHD programmes was taken on Friday at a three-day national conference of vice-chancellors, chaired by human resource development minister, Prakash Javadekar.

The minister also released the All India Survey of Higher Education (AISHE) report and said the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in higher education in the country has gone up from 25.2 percent in 2016-17 to 25.8 in 2017-18, which is calculated for 18-23 years of age group.

“Lack in innovation and quality research is the foremost challenge before the country. Quality expansion and teaching reform is the need of the hour,” the minister said.

The GER for male students is 26.3 percent while for females it is 25.4 percent. For Scheduled Castes, it is 21.8 percent and for Scheduled Tribes it is 15.9 percent as compared to the national GER of 25.8 per cent, the AISHE report noted.

The total enrolment in higher education has been estimated to be 36.6 million with 19.2 million boys and 17.4 million girls. The girls constitute 47.6 percent of the enrolment,” the survey report for 2017-18 said.

The AISHE was initiated in the year 2011 to prepare a robust database on higher education. Since then, seeing the usefulness of data collected during the first year of survey, the government decided to make this survey an annual exercise of data collection in the higher education sector.

The minister also announced that all research projects of HRD including Impacting Research, Innovation and Technology (IMPRINT) will be opened to teachers and students of all varsities. To fight plagiarism, Turnitin software will be made available at no cost basis to all universities in the country.

“The Higher Order Skills for Higher Education (HOSHE) scheme will be launched this year for providing degree (professional) to all non tech students at undergrad level. Under this, ₹10,000 crore will be made available for training and apprenticeship of 10 lakh students studying undergraduate degrees,” said Javadekar.