All the universities in the country, Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), NITs and CSIR laboratories together produce only this much. As part of an effort to bridge this gap between the PhD-holder pools of India and countries like the US and China, the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, proposes to produce about 100 PhDs by 2012 against 15 today. At the outset, the goal of IIIT was to get into research in a big way to meet the needs of the industry or society. To develop technology, it is necessary to have a very strong PhD programme. To achieve these goals, the formula which the institution has evolved is to convert an undergraduate programme into a research programme.
General technology institutions, including IITs, do not get good PhD students. Therefore, the faculty in these institutions have to rely on MTech students for research. The tenure of the latter is only of a year. Thus, there is a regular stream of students taking up research, but for only a year. The result is that no large group of researchers is formed at these institutions.
There are three interdisciplinary areas in which the institution provided courses. These are computer science, electronics and communications. Besides, there is computer-aided structural engineering, bio-informatics and computational linguistics. As for funding of the institution, initial infrastructure was provided by the government of Andhra Pradesh and the rest was managed through government aid, research consultancy and user agencies.
