PhD stipends in India and online rants

 This post was triggered by tweets such as the one quoted here: https://x.com/mnwsth/status/1800190073973137829. The complaint can be summarized as:

• ~Rs 35k for a PhD stipend is low.
• It is a full-time job, so why not pay PhD students similar salaries as the industry?
• PhD students bring patents and publications and help with improving institutional ranks.
• US PhD stipends allow us to support a family, own a car, and have a great time.

As someone who did a PhD in a small-ish university town in the US and lived in the US for 12 years, I'd like to debunk a few of these claims. 

First and foremost: a PhD is really an apprenticeship. The first 2-3 years are spent on exploring topics, learning new skills, with a huge time investment from the mentor (ideally, whether or not this happens everywhere is a matter for another debate). People online have been responding to this by saying that "Oh, even at Google you have to spend some time picking up new skills". Yes, sure. However, Google or any other company for that matter will absolutely require you to start contributing to their mission ASAP, by contributing code or whatever else. They do not pick you up with the intention of providing basic training, they pick you up on the basis of skills you already bring to the table that can be readily deployed to further their profit-making goals. Arguing that a PhD is similar is somewhat bonkers, IMO. 

During my PhD, I had the freedom to take whatever courses I needed (and those were not necessarily all directly relevant to my research, the idea is that you do whatever is necessary during a PhD to develop as a scientist and thinker!). I even spent some time in the music department learning evolutionary psychology, choral singing, and baroque composition rules. I took courses in the CS department as well, along with the main courses from the Psychology dept (my home dept). Try doing this at Google. :) 

Secondly: At least in our institute, the PhD stipend is paid not in return for any additional work. In the US, I had to earn my stipend. The research I was doing for my PhD was not considered work for the purposes of the stipend. So in the first few years for example, I had to grade for about 4-5 courses per semester. Then, I was trained during the summer to teach and in the third and fourth years, I taught Intro to Psych courses to large classes (80-120 students) every semester as an independent instructor. Only in the final year did I win a fellowship so that I could just do my PhD research and not worry about having to do extra work for my stipend. At IIITH, PhD students get paid the stipend without having to do any extra work (again, research for their own PhD is not considered work in the US, if you want to point to the US as the gold standard), and they get paid separately if they TA for courses (ranging between Rs 6000 - 16000 depending on the load). So, for those who manage their courses and research well, there are opportunities to further supplement their income.

Thirdly: My stipend in 2009 in Columbus, OH was around $1200. Yes, I managed to support my wife and myself on it. Here's how we did it: we got a studio apartment that was around 390 sqft. It had a bed, a bathroom, and a kitchenette. The studio cost us $400, which was possible only because it was a small town. Universities typically did not offer discounted housing (unlike the case in many Indian institutes). After all expenses (groceries, mobile phone bills, utilities, etc), we were probably left with $100-200 in the bank which at the time was decent savings but we had to be very careful with our spending to do that. My wife and I would go out to eat once or twice a month and share a dish in those days (Indian PhD students: how often can you afford to order food in or eat out in India?). Our family also supported us financially during those couple of years. In fact, I chose to go to Columbus, giving up my first choice (Northwestern, Chicago) primarily due to affordability considerations. We did not buy a car until much later and that too, with help from family. Our visa conditions also prevented us from doing any other work to supplement our income. In India, if you have a significant other, nothing prevents them from getting a job whereas in the US, a dependent visa restricts them from working. So I would ask people looking at all of these Twitter debates to not fully believe all these skewed accounts. Of course, some people end up in favorable situations where they may have been able to save money to buy a car while looking after their family, etc but they are unlikely to represent the average situation of an international PhD student in the US. 

Finally: Of course, PhD students are some of the most valuable personnel we all have on our teams and deserve to be treated with utmost respect. So, I am all for improving conditions for research in our institutions, having checks and balances in place so that faculty do not abuse the power they inherently have over students, etc. However, this argument that Rs 35k per month (which puts people in the top couple of %ile of earners in the country) is not a liveable wage and that the financial situation of PhD students is significantly better in the US, does not hold up to scrutiny. Starting IT jobs in the industry even in a top tier city like Hyderabad pay less than these PhD stipends. Most American PhD students also carry immense education loan burdens from their UG (yes, this situation is catching up to us in India as well but there is simply no comparison if you look at the tuition fees in the US). 

All of this said, Indian institutions and labs have a lot of work to do to improve research conditions for PhD students. Treating everybody like the colleagues they are (yes, trainees, but colleagues nevertheless) is essential. Institutional support for conference travel needs to improve but to students who complain about this: please understand that even faculty only get one-time support from the institute for conference travel throughout their entire career at top tier institutes like IIITH (it must be worse elsewhere). So I haven't been to an international conference since returning to India because I am saving the institute support for a conference that truly matters (i.e., when multiple students from the lab are presenting, so that I can help them network). The situation is such because of a general lack of funding for science in India. Blaming PIs and institutions for this is unlikely to be a productive exercise. Ultimately, the stipend is not the reason why doing a PhD in India is on average is a tougher experience than doing a PhD in the US. There are so many other factors that the US has in terms of infrastructure, the existence of accessible but reputable conferences (during our PhD, we used to rent a van to drive to conferences to manage expenses -- again, it is not the rosy picture that Twitterati paints, we had to do our own jugaad even in the US), etc. So while funding to attend conferences was not always readily available even in the US, we made do due to better accessibility.

Important caveat: This post is not about the truly unliveable stipends offered in many Indian institutes (8k per month). This post is a response specifically to the folks that argue that 35-37k stipends are unliveable and that whatever research one does for a PhD needs to be treated similarly to work that one does for Google or any other company.