Anna univ increases research fellowship at par with IITs, NITs

Mar 2, 2022, 03.47 AM IST

Chennai: To attract talented students towards research, Anna University has increased the monthly research fellowship to PhD scholars from ₹20,000 to ₹38,000, which is at par with IITs and NITs.

Each year, the university offers research fellowship to 50 PhD scholars joining various departments.

The university’s syndicate, which met on Monday, approved the proposal to increase the fellowship.

“Since central institutions offer better fellowship, we could not attract good talent towards research. The enhancement of fellowship will attract good students,” vice-chancellor R Velraj said.

The university will evolve a different selection process to award the fellowships. As per the existing method, top 50 students of the entrance test get the fellowship.

The university’s syndicate has also given permission to start 11 centres of excellence for driving the research in emerging areas like automobile technology, robotics and automation, IoT, e-vehicles, AI and data science research and application, wireless system and design, multi-disciplinary system research and energy storage.

“Some of the centres established by former VCs Kulaindaiswamy and Anandakrishnan at Anna University are doing better research compared to IITs. However, the university has not started any centres in the past two decades. Now we are creating 11 centres that are important for societal and technological development,” Velraj added.

Among the centres of excellence, two are unique. Bose-Einstein Science and Technology Centre for Fundamental Research is aimed to focus on research in basic sciences. The Centre for Liberal Arts for Science, Engineering and Technology will offer arts courses such as public policy, economics, history and archaeology to engineering students.

“Engineering students will get creative ideas by studying some arts subjects during their course,” the vice-chancellor said. Each centre will get ₹25 lakh seed funding from the university. The university also got permission to relax the norms for industry experts to do PhDs.