In the ensuing academic year, 10 students joined the five-year fellow programme, a number similar to that which joined the programme a couple of years ago.

“Ideally we would want our fellow programme strength to be 25, but students are not so forthcoming to join the course,” said Dinesh Verma, the Chief Administrative Officer at IIM Calcutta.

Verma said that the institute would like to create a pool of students with a PhD degree who could join the IIMs as faculty. Statistics indicate that only 300 students applied for the fellow programme, 20 of which were selected for the five-year programme. Ten of these students joined.

“Recently the stipend of the fellow programme has also been increased. Now a fellow student gets a stipend of Rs 22,000 in the first two years. After 2.5 years the stipend is increased to Rs 24,000. Other than this, the student can earn Rs 11,000 as a teaching assistant by helping the senior faculty,” said Bhaskar Chakraborty, head of the fellow program at IIM Calcutta.

Chakraborty said that students who complete the fellow programme get well placed as faculty in various premier management institutes.

The stagnation in the number students applying for PhDs comes at a time when seats for the two-year postgraduate course are increasing by leaps and bounds each year.

At IIM-C, the seats have increased from 250 to 407 over the last three years. The number is expected to stand at 474 in the coming year with as many as 560 seats set to increase across all IIMs. Four new IIMs are set to come up at Tiruchirapalli (Tamil Nadu), Ranchi (Jharkhand), Raipur (Chhattisgarh) and Rohtak (Haryana).

Officials at the institute feel that the trend may cause a paucity of skilled faculty members in the newly-established IIMs.

IIM-C officials recently visited various institutes like Madras University, Anna University, Benaras Hindu University, Allahabad University and some of the IITs.