About 98 postgraduate scholarships in teaching, survey engineering, geo-technical engineering, public administration, human resource management, and business administration will be offered to Bhutanese under the Government of India assistance this year.

The postgraduate scholarship programme resulted after the Plan Talks held in December 2004 where the Indian government agreed to provide 50 postgraduate courses every year starting 2005. The 98 slots includes 48 slots, which could not be implemented last year.

“Human resource development (HRD) has been given the prime focus in the Ninth Plan and has been diversified to include postgraduate scholarships and private sector skill development,” said the Deputy Chief of Mission, Dr. Ketan Shukla. “The postgraduate scholarship programme would equip Bhutan with experts in diverse fields.”

Bhutan avails about 50 undergraduate scholarships and about 50 to 80 training slots for in-service candidates from India every year under various funding schemes. A majority have graduated in engineering, medicine, agriculture and law.

Dr. Ketan Shukla said that to promote skill development in the private sector a large number of qualified Bhutanese would be sent for more than 500 courses like call centers, information technology, hotel management and other vocational training courses.

The Chief Human Resource officer of Royal Civil Service Commission, Karma C Thinley, said that the focus of HRD in the past was on strengthening the undergraduate base in various fields. Today the demands were for higher qualification and therefore it had become necessary to upgrade the qualification of existing graduates.

Karma C Thinley said that India had always been the first destination for education and training.

“Till date we have availed more than 2000 training places under various schemes since early 1950s,” she said, adding that Bhutanese government had also sponsored over 3000 candidates to India under its projects.

An estimated 5,000 students have graduated from India under the scholarship programmes over the last few decades.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 18th, 2006 at 1:05 am and is filed under Scholarship. Tags: Education, Scholarship, Student. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.