Creating Doctors

We need hundreds of them. Doctors of Philosophy or Ph.D.s, in management, I mean. We have major weaknesses in our supply chain- read universities and other institutes. Many state universities lack quality guides and/or systems, though they allow flexibility. IIMs are inflexible, though they provide quality. Who will fill the gap?

No idea, as of now. But I am happy to have contributed my mite to solving this in a small way. I just helped one of my students clear his last hurdle towards his doctorate- he cleared his final viva yesterday. We celebrated with lunch at Lemontree in e-city.  We have a Ph.D. program with NLU and plan to start our own. IMT also conducts research methodology workshops for doctoral students (some of whom are teaching as well). Hope this helps a little bit.

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.