A recent development in China has stirred an unusually quiet corner of academia. Some doctoral degrees in engineering are now being awarded not primarily on the basis of a written thesis, but on the successful demonstration of a working system or product. The news has generated predictable reactions. Some see it as a dilution of academic standards. Others view it as overdue realism. For India, the real value of this episode lies not in imitation, but in reflection.
For decades, the PhD has been treated as a gold standard of intellectual achievement. It certifies that a person can identify a question, explore it deeply, and defend their conclusions before experts. This model has served science well. It has produced discoveries, theories, and generations of trained minds. Yet, it was designed for a world where knowledge moved slowly, laboratories were insulated from markets, and impact was measured mainly through publications.
That world no longer exists.
Today, governments invest heavily in research with the expectation that it will address visible national problems. Industries look to universities not only for ideas, but for solutions that work outside the lab. Societies expect science to engage with issues such as water security, clean energy, public health, climate resilience, digital infrastructure, and national security. In this context, a quiet mismatch has emerged between what doctoral training produces and what the country increasingly needs.
This is not a new tension. It is the old debate between fundamental and application-oriented research, resurfacing in a new form. Fundamental research seeks understanding for its own sake. It is unpredictable, slow, and often transformative in ways no one anticipates. Application-oriented research starts with a problem and works backwards, constrained by cost, scale, safety, and reliability. Both are essential. The mistake is to assume that one can be judged entirely by the standards of the other.
Traditional PhD training grew largely within the culture of fundamental research. Success is measured through originality, publications, and citations. But when doctoral students are embedded in mission-driven projects, the hardest part is often not generating knowledge, but making it work in real conditions. Field variability, user behaviour, maintenance failures, regulatory constraints, and economic viability rarely feature in theses, yet they determine whether research survives beyond a journal.
China’s experiment should, therefore, be read less as a challenge to scholarship and more as a signal. It reflects a deliberate choice to recognise a different kind of doctoral excellence in engineering and technology. Importantly, China has not abandoned fundamental science. It has simply created parallel pathways for recognising deep applied capability.
Many countries have already taken gentler steps in this direction through industrial PhDs, where candidates work jointly with universities and companies. These programmes still retain a thesis, but the questions are shaped by real-world needs. The value of such models is not that they are “practical”, but that they expose doctoral candidates to constraints that papers alone cannot capture.
For India, the implications are significant. The country is in the middle of a major restructuring of its research ecosystem. The Anusandhan National Research Foundation and the broader Research, Development and Innovation push aim to expand research beyond a handful of elite institutions and align it with national priorities. Large mission-mode programmes are being articulated in water, energy, agriculture, health, materials, electronics, climate adaptation, space, and defence.
These ambitions cannot be met by funding alone. They depend on people who can translate ideas into robust systems. Doctoral students are the backbone of this effort. If their training remains disconnected from deployment realities, national missions will struggle. At the same time, if doctoral standards are diluted in the name of relevance, the long-term intellectual base will erode.
There is another, often ignored, complication. Academic behaviour is shaped not only by degrees, but by incentives. University rankings and individual evaluations rely heavily on publication counts, citations, and journal prestige. These metrics reward visibility and volume, not necessarily reliability or usefulness. As long as careers and institutions are judged this way, researchers will optimise for papers, even when national priorities demand tested solutions.
This does not mean rankings are useless. It means they are incomplete. A system that values only what is easy to count will systematically undervalue what is hard to measure, such as field performance, reproducibility, long-term reliability, and societal trust.
India does not need to replace the PhD. It needs to broaden what doctoral excellence can look like.
One path is to strengthen industrial and mission-linked PhD tracks, where theses are built around validated solutions rather than isolated experiments. Another is to develop professional doctorates in applied domains that coexist with the PhD, without pretending to be the same thing. Above all, evaluation systems must evolve to recognise outcomes that matter beyond academia.
The question India should ask is not whether to follow China, but whether its doctoral system is aligned with its aspirations. A strong nation needs people who ask deep questions and people who build dependable answers. The danger lies not in change, but in pretending that old models alone can serve new realities.
The goal, finally, is not to produce more doctorates. It is to produce better science, and science that serves society without losing its soul.
The writer is the ANRF Prime Minister Professor, COEP Technological University, Pune and former Director, Agharkar Research Institute, Pune
