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            There is genuine concern about the decrease in interest in the sciences at the undergraduate level, which has an impact on lower enrolment in higher degrees. Lack of highly trained people at the PhD level in both sciences and engineering will be serious setback to India becoming a knowledge economy in any foreseeable future.

           One of the stumbling blocks is the lack of uniformity at the first-degree level. B.Sc degree is of 3 years duration while an engineering degree is 4 years and that too with its variations of B.E, B.Tech etc that causes confusion and an unnecessary differentiation. Good students from both these streams are comparable. Relegating sciences to 3-year duration gives it some kind of an inferior status. After that a two year M.Sc and on to a PhD study seems like a long road.

          One way of rectifying the situation is to make all degrees in Sciences and Engineering (including computer science) uniform in length of 4 years and also abolish the terminology B.E and B.Tech as suggested in Ref.[1]. Let all degree be called B.S in the respective specializations. This is more in tune with the US practice. It has the advantage that increasingly there is interdisciplinary work in both areas. Areas like Nano technology and biotechnology have overlaps in both Science and engineering. As we move from specialized professional colleges to a true university system, this makes lots of sense. The first three semesters are more or less common with math, physics and chemistry and or biology and some exposure to engineering such as energy. The remaining semesters are devoted to specializations. Under ideal conditions there should be a possibility of a shift in careers depending on student motivation. That may not happen in India for a long time.

           Following the B.S degree, the postgraduate program should be a seamless program with M.S for a year (6 courses plus a project) normally and for students who do not do well may be three semesters. The transition to a PhD program should be a natural one after M.S with some qualifying exam. In this way we remove the notion that somehow M.Tech or M.Sc is a terminal degree. Hopefully this will increase the intake to the PhD program, which for a normal student should take 3 years after M.S.

          How does one implement such a program? It will take time and hopefully not much of committee work at the national level. The implementation should be left to the autonomous institutions with some kind of an oversight. It is in some sense implicit in some of the recommendations of the National knowledge commission (NKC) that advocated the concept of a university. If premier institutes like IITs, NITs, Central Universities and newly started IISERs start this 4 yr BS scheme with active support from UGC/CSIR agreeing for the seamless MS-PhD program thereafter, other universities/institutes will have no other option but to follow the same. The Indian Institute of Science can also join this bold initiative.

References
[1]. Bridging the gap: Converting our best national laboratories into ‘IISER’ T.K.Chakraborty Current Science Feb 25, 2007 
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*Dr. M. A. Pai, Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL-61801.

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