According to the University Grants Commission (UGC), after completing a four-year degree, undergraduate students will soon be allowed to enrol in PhD programmes. Students will now be able to enrol in a PhD programme after completing a four-year bachelor’s degree programme with a minimum of 75% of their possible points in the overall grade or its equivalent. After completing a four-year bachelor’s programme, those with a one-year master’s degree are also qualified.
The relevant regulation is currently being written by the UGC. It’s likely to be revealed the following week, according to a reputable news source. The panel insisted that online delivery of PhD programmes would not be permitted. Currently, obtaining admission to a PhD programme requires holding a master’s degree. On the basis of their performance in interviews, Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) may also admit students who have received scholarships in the UGC-NET, UGC-CSIR NET, GATE, CEED, or other comparable national-level exams. Another notable change made by the UGC is the elimination of the requirement that a research paper be published before a thesis may be submitted. A study by the UGC included 2,573 research scientists from the Indian Institutes of Technology and a famous central institution (IITs). The study came to the conclusion that in 75% of the core universities, mandatory publication had a negative impact on the standard of Scopus-indexed journals. However, IIT, which is not governed by UGC, published the majority of the research articles in reputable journals. This study was carried out by the UGC during a three-year period (2017–2019). According to UGC’s data, “During the three-year period, nearly 75% of students are obliged to publish in journals which are not Scopus-indexed publications due to the necessary condition to publish a paper before PhD thesis submission.”
The research revealed that, on average, 79.3% of IIT students published in Scopus-indexed journals, and 73.4% of them published several journal papers. In contrast, about 25.2% of students at Central University published articles in Scopus-indexed journals, and about 19% published several journal articles. The largest abstract and citation database for peer-reviewed literature is the Scopus Index.