Pursuing PhD has always been considered a long and strenuous process, with little attempts to track its progress. Also, since the number of students pursuing PhD is usually very less, not many attempts are made to better their conditions. But the Delhi University is attempting to change it.
As of now, about 27 departments within the DU are offering PhD courses in science, arts and commerce. The University is in the process of coming up with an online portal where each PhD student’s progress report would be readily available from their PhD enrolment to the submission of their thesis.
On this progress, an official from the examination department was quoted as saying, "A portal is being created to make the students' works reliable. Notification regarding their research works and field reports will be available on the portal. However, the research work and findings will be kept confidential."
Currently, most of the records in the PhD departments are paper based. Work related, to viva, progress report, admission, theses, attendance, marks, research report and others is done manually, thus involving quite a bit of paper work too.
The same official also said, "But with digitisation, all these records will be maintained on the online portal. The portal will not only help PhD scholars but will also ease the work pressure on the staff."
An MoU was signed between the UGC (University Grants Commission) and the DU in the year 2014 in order to upload all the dissertations and thesis of research scholars of the DU on ‘Shodhganga repository’, a digital database.