New Delhi: A 25-year-old from Haryana joined Delhi University in 2020 to pursue a PhD in Economics. That wasn’t the plan all along. His original plan was to complete his Master’s in commerce and work with a multinational firm, like many of his batchmates.
The scholar says he changed his mind after developing an interest in academia while pursuing his Master’s. He’s still not sure that he wants to join the teaching profession, but he doesn’t regret his decision to sign up for a PhD.
While the number of PhD enrolments in India has nearly tripled over the past decade, career pathways after a doctorate are limited. With limited post-doctoral opportunities and low academic salaries, many are looking beyond universities at corporate R&D or even going abroad for research jobs.
“It has been a rewarding experience, but as I progressed, I realised that I don’t want to pursue a teaching position and would rather explore other career options. However, there are very limited opportunities available in academia after a PhD,” said the PhD scholar from Haryana who did not wish to be identified.
Research and teaching are two options after a PhD, he said, but most assistant-professor positions are contractual, without the permanency or job security of other jobs.
Salary is also a concern in public institutions. Recent Delhi University notices offer guest faculty Rs 1,500 per lecture, capped at Rs 50,000 a month, even though they require the same qualifications as regular assistant professors. A regular assistant professor, meanwhile, has a starting basic pay of Rs 57,700 a month, excluding allowances.
His dilemma reflects a much larger question facing the growing number of Indian doctoral scholars today.
PhD enrolments have nearly tripled from 1.17 lakh in 2014-15 to 3.44 lakh in 2023-24, according to the government’s All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) report released in July. The report takes into account both government and private institutions.
However, a NITI Aayog assessment released in May flagged weak post-PhD career pathways, citing a limited postdoctoral ecosystem, delayed recruitment and vacant full-time faculty and researcher positions.
Former UGC chairperson Professor M. Jagadesh Kumar said the boom in PhD enrolment numbers needs to be seen in context.
“This may sound like a large number, but it was only about 0.76 percent of India’s total higher-education enrolment,” Kumar told ThePrint, referring to the roughly 3.43 lakh PhD students enrolled in 2023-24 out of nearly 4.5 crore higher-education students.
He said an increase in PhD numbers, therefore, does not by itself establish whether India has too many or too few research scholars.
“The quality of research, availability of supervisors and funding, completion rates and what graduates do after finishing their degrees also matter,” he said.
It’s not just the PhD enrollments. The number of PhDs awarded has also increased, though gradually. India awarded 21,830 PhDs in 2014-15, compared with 37,986 in 2023-24, marking a 74 percent rise. Around 3.16 lakh PhDs were awarded over the decade.
The figures are not directly comparable year-on-year because enrolment and completion occur over different periods, with doctoral programmes typically taking several years.
But taken together, they point to a much larger doctoral population entering India’s higher-education and research system.
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Why more Indians are pursuing PhDs
Experts and scholars ThePrint spoke to cited several reasons for the rise in the number of PhD enrolments.
“More universities now offer doctoral programmes, institutions are giving greater importance to research, and more students see value in a PhD. Fellowships help students pursue research without depending entirely on their families,” said former IIT Delhi director Professor V. Ramgopal Rao, currently group V-C at BITS Pilani.
“The importance attached to a doctorate in academic careers also drives demand. For some students, uncertainty in the job market may make continuing in education an attractive option,” he added.
The expansion of the higher-education system has been substantial over the same period.
Government data shows that 341 universities and university-level institutions were established between 2014-15 and 2021-22, while the number of colleges rose from 38,498 to 45,473 during the same period. Rao cautioned that the growth must be accompanied by building research capacity along with admissions.
“A good doctoral programme needs capable supervisors, adequate funding and a research environment that encourages students to question and think independently. Opening more seats is relatively easy. Building these conditions takes years,” he said.
The rise in PhD enrolment has also been attributed to another change in the higher-education system—discontinuation of the MPhil. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 recommended discontinuing the MPhil, and the change was implemented in 2022.
Antara Chakrabarty, a PhD scholar at South Asian University, said that for students seeking an academic career, a PhD has increasingly become the next step after a Master’s degree.
“An MPhil degree used to give you preliminary training in how you’re supposed to carry out PhD research,” she said. Its removal, she added, means that “most students post-Master’s have no other option (other than pursuing a PhD) if they wish to continue with academics”.
Fellowships such as the UGC’s Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) and ICSSR doctoral fellowships can also influence students’ decisions to pursue a PhD, said Shantanu Kumar, a PhD scholar at Patna University.
“In tier-2 and tier-3 cities, particularly, there are very few job options after a Master’s. The jobs available are often underpaid, and if you are good at studies and interested in academia, getting a fellowship can make pursuing a PhD a more viable option,” he said.
The UGC’s JRF currently provides Rs 37,000 a month for the first two years, rising to Rs 42,000 a month for the remaining period of the fellowship, along with an annual contingency grant.
The ICSSR’s full-term doctoral fellowship provides Rs 20,000 a month for two years, plus Rs 20,000 a year as a contingency grant.
The AISHE report says that there has been a significant increase in doctoral enrolment among women. Female PhD enrolment rose from around 47,700 in 2014-15 to 1.71 lakh in 2023-24—a 259 percent increase, according to AISHE data.
For women, Chakrabarty said, pursuing a PhD can also delay some of the traditional expectations that often follow a Master’s degree, such as marriage and settling down. At the same time, she said, the lack of stable employment after a Master’s degree can leave students with few alternatives if they want to remain in academia.
PhD boom but ‘unattractive career pathways’
However, for doctoral scholars the bigger question is what comes after the degree.
A 2026 NITI Aayog assessment of India’s research ecosystem flagged “unattractive career pathways”, saying that while India is producing a high volume of STEM PhD graduates, post-PhD career pathways are not well-developed.
It pointed to a weak postdoctoral ecosystem, delays in recruitment and vacancies in sanctioned faculty and researcher positions. The report also noted that government salaries in emerging fields such as artificial intelligence, semiconductors and biotechnology can be less attractive than private-sector opportunities.
Nimish Joseph, who completed his PhD in management studies at IIT Delhi, had always been interested in academia. But after taking a loan to fund his MTech, he decided he needed to earn first. Entry-level teaching opportunities, he said, paid only around Rs 25,000-30,000 a month, while his friends in industry were earning considerably more.
Joseph spent more than 7.5 years in the industry before returning to academia. He has now joined St Stephen’s College as a professor of practice.
But he does not want to take the traditional assistant professor route, which he sees as less financially attractive at the entry level.
His experience reflects the problem NITI Aayog has identified at a systemic level: producing more researchers does not automatically create more research careers.
Even at IIT Delhi, an exit survey of its August 2024 graduating batch found that 47 PhD students were waiting for postdoctoral research opportunities or faculty positions.
The institute said a large fraction of the roughly 5 percent of graduates still seeking appropriate career opportunities comprised PhD scholars looking for postdoctoral opportunities abroad.
NITI Aayog has separately flagged the migration of highly skilled researchers, noting that a significant share of India’s top AI researchers work abroad, where they have access to better-funded research labs and clearer career pathways.
For Anchal, 32, who completed her PhD in computer science from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2023, the decision was more straightforward.
She did not apply for a job in India after completing her doctorate. Instead, she applied for a postdoctoral fellowship in the US and was selected. During the fellowship, she worked at a university in Philadelphia, where she said the research infrastructure and laboratory facilities changed her view of where she wanted to build her career.
“I was amazed to see the facilities, which were par excellence. We can’t even think of having such laboratories and facilities in India,” she said.
The experience prompted her to look for a full-time position in the US rather than return to India. “I decided to take a full-time job here only. I am still in the process,” she told ThePrint.
In a Rajya Sabha reply in February 2026, the Department of Science & Technology said the absence of an adequate research ecosystem in India in the past had led to “some level of migration” of scientists and researchers. It also cited advanced training and exposure to diverse research ecosystems as factors behind international mobility.
According to Professor Rao, India had expanded doctoral education but without sufficiently building the ecosystem around researchers. “My concern is that we have expanded entry into research without giving enough attention to what comes afterwards,” Rao said.
Latest Department of Science and Technology data shows why expanding that ecosystem remains important: India had 354 researchers per million people in 2023, compared with 2,107 in China and 4,937 in the US.
“Our research base needs to grow substantially to support the kind of economy we want to build,” Rao added.
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Need to expand PhD careers beyond academia
The answer cannot simply be to create more faculty positions. It is also that India’s research system has traditionally treated a faculty position as the primary destination for a PhD. However, faculty positions, particularly in government institutions, are limited.
In a February 2026 Rajya Sabha reply, the government told Parliament that more than 17,000 faculty appointments had been created since 2022 across centrally funded higher-education institutions, including Central Universities, IITs, NITs and IIMs.
Yet vacancies continue to arise because of retirements, resignations, expansion of institutions and rising student numbers.
In another Rajya Sabha reply in 2025, the government said 4,889 teaching posts were vacant in Central Universities alone as of 1 July 2025. The total sanctioned faculty strength had risen to 18,951, but 25.44 percent of the posts remained vacant.
But, the numbers do not mean that thousands of vacant posts are immediately available to the growing pool of PhD holders. Recruitment is institution- and discipline-specific, and vacancies can remain unfilled because of administrative and recruitment delays.
Professor Rao said India needs to rethink what a doctorate is meant to prepare a person for. He pointed to 2024 engineering PhD data in the US, which showed that among those with confirmed employment, excluding postdoctoral positions, about 74 percent were entering industry and 14 percent academia.
In India, he said, the orientation is largely the opposite, with a faculty position still widely seen as the natural outcome of a doctorate.
“This thinking needs to change. A PhD develops the ability to work on difficult problems for which there are no ready answers—a skill that, he said, is valuable not only to universities but also to industry, government, public research institutions and startups,” Professor Rao said.
NITI Aayog has also recommended expanding the postdoctoral ecosystem, including increasing postdoctoral fellowships in science and technology by 20 percent every year for the next few years.
It has also called for a more unified fellowship framework and stronger links between research institutions and industry, recognising that doctoral graduates need more pathways between completing a PhD and securing long-term research careers.
Former UGC chairperson Kumar said the government’s Rs 1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation Fund, announced to boost private-sector research and innovation, could help create more career opportunities for PhD holders.
“Universities could explore industry-sponsored PhDs, industrial postdoctoral fellowships and joint research laboratories. Industry experts could also help identify research questions and jointly guide applied research projects. However, these initiatives would depend on qualified faculty, research facilities and reliable funding,” Kumar said.
Some institutions are already trying to strengthen this transition.
IIT Madras’ Institute Post-Doctoral Fellowship provides PhD holders an opportunity to continue research under faculty supervision while building their research and teaching credentials—creating an intermediate step between completing a doctorate and competing for longer-term academic positions. The institute also offers postdoctoral opportunities for women returning to research after a career break.
But such initiatives remain limited compared with the growing number of students entering doctoral education. For the Delhi University scholar quoted earlier, the gap between completing a PhD and finding a stable job remains a pressing concern.
“I know so many people who are just sitting and waiting for a good job opportunity, or working on low salaries as guest faculty. India needs a better job scenario for research scholars who spend so many years studying,” the Delhi University scholar said.
Is Professor of Practice the answer?
While conventional academic jobs may be less attractive to some PhD holders, the Professor of Practice (PoP) route is simultaneously creating a different, more flexible doorway into universities for experienced professionals who may never have pursued a PhD. To attract talent to academia, the University Grants Commission (UGC) introduced the PoP scheme in 2022 by creating a new category of positions that brings distinguished professionals and industry experts into higher education institutions. The move was in line with the NEP 2020.
The PoP scheme has generated significant curiosity across the higher education ecosystem in India, with over 20,608 professionals and 565 higher education institutions registered on the UGC PoP portal.
Unlike regular faculty, Professors of Practice do not have a fixed UGC pay scale. The UGC allows institutions and professionals to mutually decide a consolidated remuneration, making the route more flexible for experienced professionals.
The list of renowned professionals joining academia as Professors of Practice is growing steadily. In November last year, former Supreme Court judge Justice Abhay Oka (Retired) joined SVKM Pravin Gandhi College of Law, Mumbai, as an Honorary Professor of Practice. Later in December, former National Investigation Agency director-general Dinkar Gupta joined IIT-Ropar as a Professor of Practice.
Joseph’s return to academia as a PoP shows how better remuneration and an alternative entry route can draw professionals back to teaching.
India’s PhD boom, therefore, raises a question beyond how many doctorates the country produces: what careers will be available to those who earn them? For the growing pool of doctoral scholars, expanding the number of PhDs will matter only if India also expands the opportunities that come after them.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)