UGC Draft Regulation: Admission to PhD will now be difficult!

New Delhi: According to the new sets of draft regulations uploaded by University Grants Commission (UGC) on its website, getting admission to PhD will be difficult.

The draft regulation, which will make admission to PhD difficult, has further suggested that the institutions which come under ‘Category III Institution’, would enroll candidates who have qualified the NET or SLET or SET examinations for their PhD courses only. Regarding the amendments, the public and stakeholders can provide feedback till June 15.

National Eligibility Test (NET) is the national level test to determine eligibility for college and university level lectureship and for award of Junior Research Fellowship for Indian nationals, while State Eligibility Test (SET) is a state level test accredited by UGC for eligibility for Assistant Professors.

According to UGC, Category I University is ‘if it has been accredited by NAAC with score of 3.5 or above or if it has achieved a ranking in the top 50 institutions of the NIRF ranking in the category of universities for 2 years continuously.’

While UGC defines Category II University as ‘if it has been accredited by NAAC with score between 3.01 and 3.49 or if it has achieved a ranking from 51 to 100 in the NIRF ranking in the category of universities for 2 years continuously.’

Category III University is if it does not come either under the Category I or Category II as mentioned above and the new regulation mandates that only those candidates would be eligible for admission to PhD course into Category-III institutions who have qualified the NET, SET or SLET examinations.

The Regulations/Guidelines/Amendment uploaded by UGC for seeking feedback/comments from general public/stakeholders is available in the official website’s notices section. UGC asked the stakeholders to send feedback/comments on the draft documents to the commission by email on feedback2ugc@gmail.com on or before June 15, 2017.

The UGC (Institutions Deemed to be Universities) Regulations, 2017 differs from its 2016 variant in some ways. One of the most noticeable changes is removal of two clauses governing eligibility criteria for an institution to be declared as deemed-to-be-university.

The 2016 version mandates that faculty in Humanities, Social Sciences and Languages shall have at least 10 publications and faculty of Sciences, Medicine and Engineering shall have at least 15 publications per year, in refereed journals listed by UGC and having an impact factor. However, in the 2017 regulations this clause has been removed.

The 2016 version also had a clause which mandated that an institute should have proven record of securing merit-based extramural research funding from various public or private agencies for being recognized as a deemed to be university.

Even this has been removed from the 2017 version of regulations. The new regulations has some provisions making the work of applying for deemed to be university status to UGC easier for such institutions which are recognized as Category-I by the UGC.

UGC also put up another regulation for feedback, the University Grants Commission (Promotion and Maintenance of Standards of Academic Collaboration between Indian and Foreign Educational lnstitutions) Regulations, 2017.