The Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, appears the favourite destination among budding Indian research scientists, going by the choice of institutions students have made under a top research programme.

IISc Bangalore, the Indian Institutes of Technology, and the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research have selected 119 candidates for doctoral programmes under the Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship this June. Of these students, 50 have chosen IISc Bangalore.

Launched last year, the Fellowship allows up to 1,000 students to pursue PhD degrees at the IISc or any of the 23 IITs or seven IISERs every year. The selections are made twice a year, in June and December.

Final-year BTech students as well as final-year students doing an integrated master’s or a five-year postgraduate dual degree course in science or technology are eligible for direct admission to PhD courses in any of these 31 institutions.

IIT Bombay and IIT Madras have admitted 17 students each under the programme, followed by IIT Kharagpur with 15, IIT Delhi with 7, IIT Kanpur with 4, IIT Roorkee with 2 and IIT-BHU and IIT-Indian School of Mines with 1 each.

Three students have been selected for IISER Pune while IISER Bhopal and IISER Thiruvananthapuram have admitted one each. None of the new IITs started in the past 25 years has found a single scholar to admit under this prestigious programme in this round.

When the programme was launched in June last year, 135 students were selected. Of these 43 had chosen the IISc and the remaining 92 had picked one or other IIT. At least two of those selected had chosen a new IIT, in Hyderabad and Gandhinagar.

Former IISc director Padmanabhan Balaram attributed the students’ preference for the Bangalore institute to its long tradition in research.

“The IISc has for a long time been a highly sought after institution for students who want to do quality research. The emergence of

the IITs in the field of research is a development of the past 20-30 years. The IITs had originally been teaching institutions, focused on undergraduate and postgraduate courses,” Balram said.

He said that students get to know about the pluses and minuses of higher-education institutions from their teachers and friends, and that the IISc scores higher in public perception.

An IIT teacher agreed that the IISc did boast a better record in research than any of the premier tech schools, but claimed this wasn’t the sole reason it had received over 40 per cent of the research scholars under this Fellowship programme this year.

He blamed the selection process for the “skewed, lopsided student distribution under this programme”.

The teacher said that currently, the candidates were tested against a uniform standard, so that any student good enough to be admitted under the programme was good enough for every one among the 31 host institutions.

“The yardstick for selection is very tough: only the best candidates get selected. Obviously, most of them would prefer the IISc,” the teacher said.

His solution: the selection standards should be lowered so that more students are picked, with the lower-ranked students getting admitted to some of the newer IITs or IISERs.

“Because of the IISc-level selection criteria, the new IITs are being denied scholars under this programme,” he said. “All the 31 institutions have been kept at the same level. But they are not the same.”

However, the Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship has been envisaged as a premier scheme for those with the highest potential, with high stipends and research grants.

It provides a monthly stipend of Rs 70,000 for the first two years, Rs 75,000 a month in the third year, and Rs 80,000 a month in the fourth and fifth years. Besides, each researcher is eligible to receive a research grant of Rs 2 lakh a year.

To be able to apply, a candidate’s mean “cumulative grade points average” score must be at least 8 out of 10 across their BTech programme, or they must have achieved equivalent scores in their integrated master’s or dual degree programmes.

There’s no written test, and the selection is done on the basis of a candidate’s score in an interview where experts examine the originality of the research proposal, its potential and the student’s understanding.