Some years ago and a few weeks after I had assumed charge as the Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University, I received a sealed letter from a sitting judge of the Supreme Court of India. The venerable justice had discovered unabashed plagiarism in a doctoral dissertation in the discipline of law that had been submitted to him in his capacity as an official examiner. There are several issues that arose for me in the context of the judge’s complaint. To begin with, what was the supervisor of the doctoral candidate doing? In this case, he was a fairly senior professor. It was apparent that he had been utterly careless. Then there was the matter of the doctoral student. What had prompted him to indulge in such a blatant act of plagiarism? However, as I discovered over time, this was not a isolated incident. During the course of my tenure, I kept coming across cases of shoddy doctoral dissertations where the external examiners had taken pains to be diligent and had pointed out the poor quality. Here a few samples: I had agreed to act as examiner for a mathematics dissertation from a university that had a strong reputation some decades ago. To my utter disgust I found that the thesis was no better than tuition centre notes dealing with undergraduate level problems of a poor quality. I also came across a dissertation in the discipline of political science which had been granted approval for a PhD degree but where the work was based on trivial use of data leading to implausible inferences. I was also once informed by a very good mathematician in the US that he had suffered undue and extreme harassment by a doctoral candidate from an Indian university. This candidate had made brazen attempts to get his dissertation approved by means that were in violation of regulations.
Over the last few years, the situation has deteriorated further. However, let me also add that I do keep coming across some very high quality doctoral dissertations emanating from our universities but they are in a small minority. What are the reasons for this rather worrying situation and can something be done to rectify the problem? There exists a stark disparity in the quality of PhD programmes across institutions, with a handful of the IITs, IISERs, and IISc maintaining global standards.
If we recognise that the chief reason for the low quality of the doctoral dissertations lies in the fact that the quality of research faculty is woefully inadequate then the situation becomes clear. All other factors fade before the charge of our universities having such poor quality research faculty. The sooner the UGC and the Ministry of Education tackle this problem, the better. I hope to share some very practical and useful suggestions for them.