The past three academic years have seen the lowest number of Indian research scholars going abroad. Over 6.20 lakh Ph.D. holders opted to go abroad in 2018-2019 while in 2017-2018, 8.06 lakh research scholars went abroad. This showed a steady decline of around 2 lakh students during the period 2017 to 2018.
6.84 lakh research scholars went abroad in 2016-2017 as per the data revealed by the Ministry of Human Resouce Development (HRD) in a written reply presented in Parliament.
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As compared to the previous years, the number of scholars who seek to go to the United States of America has reduced to half. As many as 2.09 lakh scholars chose to go to the US in 2018-19 as against 4.37 lakh scholars in 2017-18. The same was 4.23 lakh in the previous year. However, the number of scholars who opted to go to Australia and Canada has increased.
The data put forward by the HRD Ministry said that the number of Ph.D. Indian researchers in Central universities is way lower. It revealed that amongst 1.69 candidates only 15,941 students who opted for Ph.D. courses in different parts of the country have been registered in the central universities.
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Research showed that India stands far behind its counterparts. While the US has 111 and 423 researchers per lakh of the population, India has only 15 researchers per lakh. It is even lower than that of China. Israel being a small nation has a much higher number in terms of researchers which stands at 825 per lakh population. This was the data disclosed by the HRD in National Education Policy (NEP).