Premier B-schools are taking steps to sharpen their focus on doctoral programmes. They hope the strategy will help in attracting more participants, while improving the quarlity of research work on their campuses in the coming years.
For instance, IIM Bangalore (IIM-B) is in talks with the Ethiopian government to send students to IIM-B to undertake the Fellow Programme in Management (FPM). IIM Kozhikode (IIM-K), on its part, is setting up a post doctoral research centre to help participants continue research before taking up any academic post. On the other hand, IIM Ahmedabad (IIM-A) raised its stipend to Rs 17,000 last year, apart from providing Rs 25,000 worth contingency allowance and reimbursement of international conference up to Rs 1,75,000 to attract more applicants for its FPM.
“The attempt has always been to increase the number of participants for the doctoral programmes and encourage students to take up academic work within the campus as well as outside. While good stipend has been a major driver for attracting participants, it is not the only tool that will work. Doctoral students also look for good research opportunities and publishing of works. Which is why we set up a post doctoral research centre that will help students stay back at the campus to continue research as long as they don't enter the job scene,” says Debashis Chatterjee, director, IIM-K.
The centre has been set up to help the institute encourage participants to take up faculty jobs within the campus.
In a bid to provide domestic as well as international research exposure to its doctoral programme participants, IIM Lucknow (IIM-L) has also tied up with some universities in the US. “We are growing at a good number and get 15 students every year. We have tied up with couple of universities in the US including University of Connecticut and we are looking at research sharing and dual supervision from faculty at IIM-L as well as their faculty. The point is that while doctoral programme is growing at large, the government has not been providing direct funding to it, though there is a proposal that has been put up for the same. Hence, as of now, the institute is trying to attract as many participants as possible by paying stipends from our own corpus,” said Devi Singh, director of IIM-L.
With already 50 doctoral students at the campus, IIM-L intends to increase the intake from current 15 to 25. “The idea is to have 100 PhD students from the campus at any given time. A good number of annual intake would be around 25 students every year,” adds Singh. IIM-B too is eyeing 150 doctoral students at any given time. The IIMs hope the doctoral programmes will help them achieve their target of reducing the demand and supply gap.