Scores of research fellows held a hunger strike on Friday at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, to protest the delay in revision of their stipends while their peers at several Indian Institutes of Technology sat on dharnas pushing the same demand.

PhD scholars at various research institutes and universities who have qualified for the Junior Research Fellowship receive Rs 25,000 a month for the first two years and Rs 28,000 a month for the next three.

The Centre is expected to revise the amount every four years. A revision was expected last year since the previous revision happened in 2014. The research scholars had written to the government through their institutions to hike the stipends.

“Today we observed a hunger strike during the daytime. Students from other research institutions in Bangalore participated in the dharna,” said Sachin Tripathi, a research scholar at the IISc.

“We will intensify our agitation until the government revises the fellowship,” he added.

Tripathi said the scholars, mindful of the rising costs of living, had been demanding a stipend of Rs 50,000 a month for the first two years and Rs 56,000 for the next three.

Several hundred students had come to protest in front of the human resource development ministry office in New Delhi on Wednesday. Police detained them, and no senior official met them.

Tripathi said the scholars would form a human chain at the IISc on Sunday and then decide their next course of action.

He said the Junior Research Fellowship scholars, who have to clear the National Eligibility Test and an interview, receive a far lower stipend than do the Prime Minister Research Fellows, selected only through an interview to pursue research in the IISc and the IITs. The average stipend under the PMRF, launched last year, is Rs 75,000 a month.

Abdul Ali, a research scholar at IIT Bombay, said the protesters there had held a candlelight march on Thursday and would continue to do so for around an hour every evening.

“The revision is done once in four years. It was done in 2006, 2010 and 2014. By now, it (the stipend) should have been revised,” he said.

Research scholars held protests on Friday at IIT Bhubaneswar, IIT Delhi and several central universities.

By convention, the department of science and technology revises the stipend at its research institutions, and other ministries implement it for research students at institutions under their administrative control. This is what happened in 2014 too.

“We are waiting for the DST to revise the rates,” a senior human resource development ministry official said on Friday. He said that once the department of science and technology finalised the revised rates, his ministry would follow suit.

Sources in the department of science and technology said a stipend-revision proposal had been sent to the finance ministry, which was sitting on it.