A Landmark

My first Ph.D. student submitted his thesis this week to the university I worked with once at Bangalore. It is a landmark of a kind, though it will take a while for him to clear the evaluation and defend his thesis , and get his doctorate. My Ph.D. was obtained in the US, which has a totally different system, more autonomous, with the guide and his university department doing everything in one place. Here, we have a more distributed system for part time Ph.D. students.

Which brings me to my regular lament- or famous grouse, to borrow from the name of a whisky. That we don't have enough good institutions offering a Ph.D. program in India, at least in the area of Management. The system we have does not encourage excellence with a few exceptions, and falls short of most autonomous institutions like those in the US or Europe. IMT now has a new Ph.D. program in collaboration with NLU Jodhpur, an autonomous institution. We hope we will be successful in launching a few good doctorates in management. Academics should also pay well enough to attract talent to teaching and research. We are relatively better than we were a couple of decades ago, but we still have only about 30-40 institutions of excellence in management. We need a hundred more, at least.