Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, India

E4Life PhD in Sustainable Development

India’s socio-economic growth and development depend upon the sustenance of its rural communities, as 70% of its population are still living in rural villages. These communities form the backbone of the country. Despite the country’s overall progress, the rural population has been facing numerous pressing problems that need to be addressed. Some of the challenges they face include extremely poor access to basic facilities and infrastructure, poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, and waste management, along with the unexpected impact of climate change and extreme weather conditions that result in devastating natural disasters.

To address these challenges, under the Amrita School for Sustainable Futures, 100+ fully funded doctoral fellowships for pursuing a full-time PhD program under various thematic areas of Sustainable Development are offered. This program titled “E4LIFE - Education for LIFE” where the four Es stand for Experience, Embrace, Empower, and Engage, provides many underprivileged students access to a doctoral program with low financial burdens and helps create an atmosphere to focus solely on research and develop effective societal outcomes in addition to research outcome. This program is integrated with a comprehensive yet flexible Experiential Learning Curriculum that aims to enrol and cater to candidates from various disciplines.

Top 3 Learnings

1. The use, implementation, and benefits of participatory rural appraisal techniques and co-design and co-implementation methods with the community to help quicker adoption of sustainable solutions to make communities self-reliant.
2. The program does not limit itself to the standard metric of research outcomes alone but also focuses on societal outcomes for each project in each village of implementation.
3. The program is highly diverse with many international students and faculty from all socio-economic and cultural backgrounds.