Prime Minister’s Fellowship for Doctoral Research scheme is a prestigious initiative of SERB towards the advancement of university research engagements in line with industry requirement. This scheme is aimed at encouraging young, talented, enthusiastic, and result-oriented scholars to take up industry-relevant research by partnering with institutions of academic excellence. The intent was to leverage research with industry’s innovative capacity by providing access to know-how and facilities. These are critical in advancing expertise and technologies leading to tangible economic outcomes like patents, licenses, non-patented and non-licensed new products, and processes.
Under this scheme, fulltime PhD scholars get double the JRF/SRF fellowship amount, as scholarship. The scheme has the provision to award up to 100 new scholarships every year. As per the provisions of the scheme, the scholarship is given for a maximum period of four years. While one-half of this scholarship comes from the government, the second half comes from a partner company which also works closely with the candidate on the research project.