If India wants to witness substantial development, the research output should exponentially increase. This was one of the key points made at the launch of eGate, an online tutorial course for aspirants taking the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE).

Abhijit Chaudhari, the director of Gateforum, the Hyderabad-based tutorial centre that launched the online coaching course, said that students should pursue higher studies beyond doing the four-year engineering course.

“For every 3 lakh students, 1 lakh get a computer engineering degree, but the number of PhDs in this stream is just 100. The gap is too high to ignore,” he said.

However, the GATE exam is highly competitive, said Chaudhuri. “There are 7 lakh students taking the exam in the country for 40,000 seats. We want to make sure there are quality teaching centres, even in rural areas, but it is not possible to set up centres in all parts of the country; hence we have taken the online route to reach the masses,” he said. The course, which works on normal speed broadband Internet, is a series of live classes broadcast via internet with two way interaction between the faculty and the students.

“There is a particular time you have to tune in to attend the class and you can also ask questions through a chat system and you can rewind the sessions. So, anyone in the country can access the best faculty available in Hyderabad, a city known as the hub for GATE coaching centres,” he said.