School of Humanities and Social Sciences

MA Admissions

Duration of the programme: 2 years

Candidates who have qualified for the award of a three/four-year Bachelor Degree (B.A., B.Sc., B.Tech. or equivalent), after 10+2 or equivalent schooling, from a recognized University or Institute with at least 55% marks (or 6.0 CGPA on a scale 10), are eligible to apply for admission to the programme. Students belonging to reserved categories will get a relaxation as per institute rules.

Selection Procedure:
The concerned School shall adopt qualifying criteria for short-listing for interview/written test and prepare a merit list of selected candidates after interview/written test for all the categories.

M.A Selection procedure should include tentative months of intake or starting dates of programme like April End & May months every year

Number of seats:
As per Senate approved guidelines.

Credit requirements:
Candidate would have to complete 80 credits for the successful completion of M.A. in Development Studies. A maximum of 2 additional credits (82 credits in total) can be accommodated. The distribution of credits across types of courses will be as follows:

Criteria	Credits
Discipline Core	(8x3)+(2x1)= 26
Discipline Electives	6x3= 18
Outside Discipline Electives	2x3= 6
Field Study	1x4=4
Problem Course	1x4=4
Dissertation/Guided Internship	22

Discipline Cores:
Discipline cores are designed to give the students an exposure to different thoughts and theories of ‘development’ evolved over time and an understanding of development ‘challenges’ and ‘praxis’ prevailing at a global, national and sub-national scale. It also provides the students with the unique opportunity to understand the fundamental of some scientific and engineering concepts that they have to deal with as development practitioners, irrespective of their disciplines. One course on research methodology and one course on technical communication are also included as discipline core

Discipline Electives:
A pool of discipline electives will help the students to go deeper into selected development challenges.
Outside Discipline Electives: Students have to take two elective courses offered in the institute but outside the pool of discipline electives for the Development Studies Programme.

Field Study:
The first task of a development practitioner is to ‘diagnose’ the problem on the ground, to understand the ‘socio-economic nuances’ of the problem and to have a thorough understanding of the ‘agencies’ who are already working on the ground. For the 4-credit course “Field Study”, students will have to go and stay in a rural/urban community for the duration of 46 weeks between their 2nd and 3rd Semester. This course is expected to help students to learn how to diagnose the development challenges and get the praxis right.

Problem Course:
This is a 4-credit course, under which groups of 3-4 students will have the opportunity to work under the supervision of one/two faculty members from different Schools and with diverse research interests to address an existing development challenge from a multidisciplinary perspective. This will be particularly helpful both in terms of learning several dimensions of the problem and team work at the same time.