St Xavier’s University will offer PhD programmes from the academic session starting September.

The three-year-old university will begin with doctoral programmes in English, commerce and mass communication in the 2019-20 session and extend the facility to subjects such as management, economics, social work and law in the coming years, Father Felix Raj, the vice-chancellor of the university, said.

The University Grants Commission (UGC) rules allow a university to introduce doctoral programmes only after running postgraduate courses for two years. The New Town institute completed two years of its functioning a few months ago.

“Research is one of our principal academic activities. All possible steps were taken over the past two years to ensure that we could start the PhD programmes at the end of our second year. Our aim is to make the university a research-driven institution,” he said.

All the doctoral programmes will be conducted strictly in compliance with the UGC norms. Scholars will be admitted on the basis of an entrance test. The XU Research Aptitude test of the University (XURAT) to be conducted by the university will be held on August 24.

Twenty-eight students will be admitted in three subjects in the first year. Teachers holding the rank of professors will guide a maximum of eight scholars each. Those in the rank of associate professor will guide a maximum of six students and not more than four will be supervised by assistant professors, Felix Raj said.

All aspiring candidates can start submitting applications from July 10. The details of the admission tests and the brochure of the PhD programmes will be available on the university’s website `www.sxuk.edu.in`.

The university has set up a separate body comprising academics and teachers for supervision of the doctoral programmes. Jadavpur University vice-chancellor Suranjan Das is a member of the university’s Board of Research.

A research centre has been set up on the sprawling 17-acre campus equipped with conference rooms, library, separate cubicles for the scholars and lecture rooms. The facilities at the research centre are on a par with the research institutes of international standards, the vice-chancellor said.