On a weekend afternoon, when most offices in Jammu were shut, Poonam Kundal was still in her laboratory at Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology, analysing the DNA of rice plants she has edited using CRISPR-Cas, one of the recent gene-editing tools in modern biology.
She is not paid a rupee for it.
Ms. Kundal is one of many Indian doctoral scholars who compete for a small pool of fellowships and end up without one. She sat the National Eligibility Test, the gateway to the Junior Research Fellowship, and applied to several other schemes, including some meant for women. None came through. So she funds her own PhD, a commitment of at least four years, out of her own pocket.
“It limits our growth. It limits our critical thinking also,” Kundal said, “because somewhere we hesitate to extend our work or get into more details, because we know we won’t be getting the resources to do that.”
Her situation is far from rare. PhD enrollment in India rose from about 203,000 in 2019-20 to 344,000 in 2023-24, according to the government’s All India Survey on Higher Education, but the University Grants Commission awards the Junior Research Fellowship, or JRF, for only about 11,750 slots a year.
Those left out live on far smaller stipends or none at all.
Research out of pocket
Biotechnology runs on a steady supply of enzymes, reagents and kits, and a single missing item can stall an experiment for days. Ms. Kundal said she cannot afford to wait.
“If we are short of a few things while performing an experiment, we cannot wait for things to be provided by our department or anyone else. So we go and buy them ourselves,” she said.
The bills do not stop at the lab bench. Tuition fees come out of her pocket, and so do the costs of getting a paper published.
The squeeze reflects how little India spends on research overall. Gross expenditure on research and development reached 0.84 percent of GDP in 2023-24, according to the Department of Science and Technology’s latest R&D statistics. That is a record for India but well below China’s 2.58 percent.
Even scholars who win the JRF say the money falls short. The UGC raised the fellowship from ₹31,000 to ₹37,000 a month in January 2023, and the senior fellowship from ₹35,000 to ₹42,000.
Eight thousand rupees and a recorder
For scholars at central universities who miss the JRF, the main safety net is the UGC’s non-NET fellowship. It was introduced in 2006 at ₹5,000 a month and raised to ₹8,000 in 2012, and it has not changed since.
Najam-us-Saqib knows those numbers from the inside. Now an assistant lecturer and assistant dean at the Office of Interdisciplinary Studies at O.P. Jindal Global University, he pursued his PhD at the Central University of Kashmir, where he lived on the 8,000-rupee stipend for four years.
“There has been no increase in the stipend for more than 10 years,” Mr. Saqib said, “while inflation has increased rapidly.”
His fieldwork required a voice recorder for interviews. It cost ₹8,000 to ₹9,000, more than a full month’s stipend.
“You would have to save your stipend for three months and then buy those things,” he said. “And in those three months, you would have to go to the field and manage your expenses. You had to eat, drink, everything.”
“What all would you do with ₹8,000?,” Saqib asked.
Adil Hussain Malik, a research scholar at Aligarh Muslim University, another central university, drew the same ₹8,000 through all five years of his PhD. He said in many months he had to spend ₹10,000 to ₹12,000 on photocopying alone . “Now think about it, what can a person get for 8,000?” he said.
To get by, he said, scholars take up other work alongside their research, teach at private institutions, or rely on money their families send each month. Non-NET scholars outnumber JRF holders, he noted, and have protested again and again for a raise, but the government has paid no attention.
In a July 20 written reply in the Lok Sabha, Minister of State for Education described the Non-NET Fellowship as only a “partial support” for PhD scholars, but did not say whether the ₹8,000 monthly stipend would be raised. Opposition lawmaker Shashi Tharoor, who had asked the question, called the reply “disappointing,” saying it offered no timeline for a revision.
Thirty months of waiting
On 30 June 2023, research scholars held a nationwide protest because the fellowship increase that had just come through was too small. The All India Research Scholars Association (AIRSA) called it a “Black Day” for researchers. The protest was a reaction to the revised fellowship rates, which took effect from 1 January 2023: JRF ₹31,000 to ₹37,000 a month, about 19% hike; and SRF ₹35,000 to ₹42,000 a month, about 20%
Research associate stipends went up as well. This was the first revision since 2019. Scholars had been campaigning for about a year for at least a 60% increase for JRFs, SRFs and research associates, and saw the hike as far below what inflation and living costs justified. The rates were set by the Department of Science and Technology, and the UGC applied them to its own JRF and SRF fellowships.
The bigger fellowship offers little cushion, said a doctoral scholar at Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi who asked to be identified by the pseudonym Mursaleen. “It is almost certain that if you don’t have JRF you still have to ask your parents for help. Even JRF money just makes you survive,” Mursaleen said. “If you are living outside your home city, will you pay rent, food, or buy books, research material or do ground work with this money?”
For some scholars, the problem is not only how little they are paid but how late. Arjun S Mohan, a fourth-year PhD scholar in political science at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, Kerala, studies citizenship and homelessness. He received his first fellowship payment in his 30th month.
Kerala’s State universities run their own fellowships alongside a state government scheme. Both now pay about ₹15,000 a month. The university fellowship was ₹12,000 when Mohan began receiving it.
The trouble began with fieldwork. He got through roughly half of it with help from friends and family. “If we want to have even a single meal, we have to call a friend and borrow money,” he said. For 15 to 20 months he borrowed from friends, faculty members and family friends. After that, “it becomes unbearable,” he said. His mental health, he added, took a hit.
In March 2025, Mohan joined an eight-day protest led by the All Kerala Research Scholars Association. Such protests have become routine in the state, he said, as each new batch adds to the backlog.
His demand is simple. “The fellowship should be distributed monthly,” he said. “Only when we receive the money monthly can we begin the work.”
A degree that may not pay
For Ms. Kundal, money is only part of the weight. As a woman, she said, she carries family and social expectations that male colleagues rarely face, and they shape even the hours she can spend in the lab.
“We cannot, like boys, work at night also. We girls have a time limitation for our working,” she said. “So it limits our productivity somehow.”
The numbers point to a leak. Women make up 49.8 percent of PhD enrollment in India, yet they account for only 29 percent of the country’s researchers, the Department of Science and Technology’s 2025-26 statistics show.
The end of the degree brings its own worry. Ms. Kundal said doctorate holders often land jobs that pay no more than those open to graduates. “This is a very demotivating kind of thing,” she said. “Critical thinkers and researchers are also a resource to a country, but they are not being paid or invested in properly.”
Ms. Kundal called for well-funded projects tied to national development needs, which would in turn pay researchers properly. “We have a lot of young minds. We just need to direct their energy,” she said. “What do you expect from a person who is not being paid enough even to fulfill the basic needs of a family?”
She hopes to submit her thesis next year. Despite the costs, she said, the weekend shifts do not feel like a burden.
“When I am doing experiments, I feel satisfied after performing them,” Ms. Kundal said. “I can work on weekends also for this.”