Budget grant: DSE to offer PhDs

A budget grant of Rs 10 crore to the Centre for Development Economics (CDE) the Research arm of Delhi School of Economics and to Ratan Tata Library, will help CDE launch a fellowship programme for PhD students.

The institute will select three students and provide a fellowship of Rs 30,000 per month for five years. Lack of proper scholarships and full fellowships has been considered a major impediment to attract students to take up PhD.

Though the exact break-up could not be ascertained, it is expected that of Rs 10 crore, Rs 3 crore will be used by CDE to fund the fellowships.The balance Rs 7 crore will be used by the Ratan Tata Library.

“About Rs 12 lakh will be used every year for financing the fellowships and another Rs 8 lakh will be used towards foreign faculty,” said Prof Santosh C Panda, Executive Director, CDE Council.

At present, the department does not offer a PhD programme. University Grants Commission offers fellowship for PhDs but for availing the same a student has to sit for exam and can only access the results a year later.

“Getting students to do PhDs is really difficult as they have to leave a corporate job. So we need to offer them incentives,” Panda added.

However, at the Master’s level there are number of scholarships for the students including the Manmohan Singh scholarship offered by Prime Minister himself.

The CDE was set up with a grant from the Ministry of Finance, as a research adjunct of the Delhi School of Economics. It is a non-profit organisation that supports research in all areas of economics. It came into existence in August 1992 and began effectively functioning from early 1993. Its list of advisors include Nobel Laureates like Amartya Sen, Kenneth Arrow and Joseph Stiglitz among others.

Part of the fund will be used by Ratan Tata Library, considered to be the best library for economics in the country. It has a total collection of over 300,000 books; subscribes to 500 journals; annual reports of 800 joint-stock companies and numerous publications of the UN and other international agencies.

“We will use part of the fund for subscribing to research oriented journals in the field of economics, geography, commerce and sociology. A part of the fund may also be used for preserving and digitising the census reports which are in bad condition now,” Head of Ratan Tata Library Lokesh Sharma said.

The libray had made a demand for Rs 7 crore towards preserving the journal and Rs 2 crore for digitising the census.