Overseas Visiting Doctoral Fellowship(OVDF)

Overview

About OVDF

An OVDF application is settled before it is written. The scheme accepts PhD students only for overseas institutions that have signed an agreement or MoU with the funder for student mobility, and the scheme page names two of them, telling applicants headed to either one to apply to the university directly rather than to the funder (Overseas Visiting Doctoral Fellowship, Anusandhan National Research Foundation). A research plan that no MoU host has agreed to has nowhere to be filed.

What the fellowship buys is a spell of research training inside a foreign laboratory during the doctorate, for a student whose registration, thesis and degree stay with an Indian institution the whole time. Custody of the scheme now sits with the Anusandhan National Research Foundation, which files it under a menu it labels Erstwhile SERB Schemes.

The scale is small, and the funder's annual report is the only place that states it. For 2022-23 the board recorded an intake of 25 students at Purdue University and 10 at the University of Alberta against the two mobility agreements, reported 25 fellows selected on the Purdue side and 10 on the Alberta side in that reporting period, and put expenditure on new and ongoing fellowships at Rs 7.71 crore (Annual Report 2022-23, Science and Engineering Research Board). Those are one year's figures rather than a standing quota, but they are the closest published measure of how many places a call carries.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

The window shown on the scheme page runs from 1 November 2023 to 2 January 2024, and no later window is published there. Applications are sought annually by the two MoU universities (Research Networking, Anusandhan National Research Foundation), so the practical signal for a student is a call notice on the Purdue or Alberta side rather than an announcement in India. There is no common national start month either: what fixes an individual start date is the letter of offer from the host university.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Only Indian nationals may apply, and only students already registered for a full-time PhD at a recognised institution or university in India, in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, which the guidelines stretch to cover medicine, pharma, agriculture and related science and technology areas. No particular class of Indian institution is named, so a state university, a national institute and an IIT stand on the same footing here.

The condition students underestimate sits next to those two. The applicant must already hold an offer letter from a reputed overseas institution to carry out research for a stated duration, and the host supervisor has to give official confirmation that they will host the student, spelling out the period of stay and the other requirements. The host arrangement is the applicant's own work, made before the form exists, not something the funder brokers afterwards. The published eligibility sets no age limit and no minimum number of years spent on the doctorate; what it fixes is the stage, which is registered and not yet submitted.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

The guidelines close the scheme off in four places. Part-time students and sponsored students are not considered. Anyone who has already submitted a thesis for the award of the PhD is out, so the door shuts at exactly the moment a scholar's own work is finished. A selected fellow may not draw their regular research fellowship in India while holding the overseas fellowship, which rules out treating OVDF as a second income on top of a JRF or an institute stipend. And an overseas institution that has not signed an agreement with the funder cannot host an OVDF student at all, however willing the professor.

The host side carries its own cap, written into the Indian guidelines rather than the university's. Purdue faculty may support only one OVDF application per call, so a laboratory that has already agreed to nominate one Indian student has no room for a second.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Nothing about OVDF works like an annual scholarship that is re-sanctioned each year. The research training runs up to twelve months, and in exceptional circumstances the fellowship may be extended by six more months, subject to performance evaluation. That extension clause is not published everywhere: the consolidated research networking summary of the scheme states the twelve-month duration and stops there (Research Networking, Anusandhan National Research Foundation), so the scheme's own page is the fuller text to work from.

The duration is not a fixed block either. When the funder announced its selections on 18 March 2019, the sanctioned tenures on that single list ran to 6, 9 and 12 months, decided fellow by fellow (SERB Overseas Visiting Doctoral Fellowship, selected applications).

What you get

Award & benefits

The student's side of the award is a monthly amount in dollars plus a small set of one-time heads.

The unusual part of OVDF is that it also pays for the two supervisors to visit each other once during the fellowship, in both directions, at rates that differ by leg and by length of stay.

Any travel cost above the airfare ceiling is borne by the visitor. The monthly fellowship is written as an amount equivalent to US $2000 rather than as a rupee figure, and the supervisor heads switch currency by direction, dollars for the leg out of India and rupees for the leg into it.

• The selected fellows will be paid a monthly fellowship amount equivalent to US $ 2000, one-time Contingency/Preparatory allowances of ₹60,000/- to cover visa fees, airport transfer charges, medical insurance, etc.
• The selected fellows will also be provided the shortest route economy class airfare from their place of work in India to the place of the host institute and back. Students should make their own arrangements for accommodation etc.
• One visit, each by the Indian supervisor to the Overseas Institution where the student is working and overseas faculty to the host Indian Institution of the student is also admissible under the Scheme. The following provisions are made for them to undertake research visits:
• Travel: Both the Indian supervisor and overseas scientist will be provided the shortest route round-trip economy class airfare not exceeding ₹1.5 lakhs per round trip from their place of work to the city of the host institute and back. Any additional cost would have to be borne by the visitors.
• Per-diem (Subsistence Allowance): Indian Supervisors to Overseas CountryOverseas host to IndiaOverseas host to IndiaUp to 14 days>14 and up to 30 daysUS $ 75 per day up to 30 days₹3000/- per day₹2000/- per day
• Accommodation: Indian Supervisors to Overseas CountryIndian supervisors to Overseas CountryOverseas host to IndiaOverseas host to IndiaUp to 14 days>14 and up to 30 daysUp to 14 days>14 and up to 30 daysUS $ 150 per dayUS $ 100 per day₹4500/- per day₹3000/- per day
• Contingencies and related travel costs: Allowance of US $ 250 per visit is provided to both Indian Supervisor and Overseas host to cover the expenditure incurred towards visa fees, travel / medical insurance, airport transfers, and other contingencies.
• Note: For scientists/researchers in regular employment, rules governing payment of salary, leave, medical, gratuity, GPF pension, etc. of the organization/ institution/ university to which the faculty belongs would continue to be applicable. No liability on any of these accounts will be borne by SERB.

What to prepare

Documents required

The identity, passport and bank documents on the scheme record are the routine half. The half that actually stops applications is institutional. The application has to be forwarded through the head of the organisation or department where the applicant is enrolled for the PhD, carrying the Indian supervisor's recommendation. Separately, the candidate submits a letter from the overseas host approving the research plan, endorsed by the Indian supervisor, and a copy of the acceptance letter from the host institution.

The portal asks for the same material in a fixed order: PhD details, Indian supervisor details, overseas host scientist details, proposed research details, other information, then the uploads (Proposal submission for the OVDF scheme, SERB online). Two of those three institutional letters have to be signed by people in different time zones, which is what sets the real timeline on a file.

Step by step

How to apply

Start at the university, not at the funder. Applications are invited from PhD students to work with overseas institutions that have signed an agreement or MoU for student mobility, and applicants who intend to visit Purdue University at West Lafayette in the United States or the University of Alberta at Edmonton in Canada are told to apply directly to that university. The scheme page gives a named contact at each: Heidi Arola, Director for Global Partnerships at Purdue, and Nicole Dewart, Senior Coordinator of the Sponsored Student Program at Alberta. A proposal can only be submitted when a call for applications has been made, so there is nothing to file outside a window.

The proposal itself is built on the funder's portal. The mandatory information form under User Profile has to be filled before the Form Submission section can be worked through, and the dashboard confirms in as many words that a profile is ready for proposal submission. From there the applicant selects the scheme, moves through the six sections, saves drafts along the way, and reaches a Preview and Submit screen where the whole proposal can be downloaded as a PDF or read as HTML before the submit button is pressed. A draft can still be edited or deleted at that point; after submission it cannot.

Two different screens answer the question of where an application has got to. An unfinished draft stays under Proposal Submission at Saved Proposal; a proposal that has already gone in is listed under Inbox at View Proposal, together with its current status (Frequently Asked Questions, Anusandhan National Research Foundation portal). Beyond that screen the funder asks applicants to quote the registration or letter number it issued in every later communication, which is what the programme office uses to pull a file when a student writes to the OVDF desk. The outcome itself arrives as a web announcement naming the provisionally selected applicants against their application numbers, and no separate communication is sent in the case of unsuccessful applications.

How winners are picked

Selection process

A selection committee is constituted to choose the applicants. The funder's own announcement sets out what the committee weighed: the topic of research, the credentials of the applicant, the supervisors and the host mentors, and the value of the expected outcome. It also states which applications were put in front of the committee at all, and that wording is worth reading twice, because applications developed by the Indian supervisor and the foreign scientist through ongoing as well as existing active collaborations, built through government mechanisms, were the ones considered. A cold approach to a famous laboratory is not the profile this scheme rewards. Selection is provisional and remains subject to the eligibility conditions in the call.

That 2019 announcement also records how much the scheme has since narrowed. It named 40 selected fellows placed with hosts in Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Japan, France, Israel, Sweden, Singapore and the United States among other countries, with Indian supervisors at IITs, NITs, central and state universities, AIIMS, national laboratories and medical colleges (SERB Overseas Visiting Doctoral Fellowship, selected applications). The current guidelines route students through the two MoU universities instead. An older description of OVDF, or a senior scholar's account of a stay in a laboratory in none of those two countries, is describing the earlier open form of the scheme.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

A fellow may not draw a regular Indian research fellowship while on OVDF. The supervisors' exchange visits must fall inside the tenure of the applicant's PhD work, and each supervisor has to keep a residency of at least two weeks and not more than 30 days at the counterpart institute. The employment clause in the guidelines is written for scientists and researchers in regular employment rather than for the fellow, which on this scheme means the two supervisors: salary, leave, medical, gratuity, GPF and pension keep running on their own organisation's rules, and the funder carries no liability on any of those heads.

The Indian institution carries obligations too. It has to ensure the scientific equipment, infrastructure and research personnel needed for the overseas scientist's return visit are available, and to extend administrative support to the work. Every later communication has to quote the registration or letter number the funder issued, and the guidelines ask that information be entered under every section of the form even where the answer is nil.

Get help

Contact

The desk that answers scheme questions is not the desk that opens the call, and mixing the two costs an applicant weeks. For the call itself the enquiry belongs with the host universities, through the two contact persons the scheme page publishes. For the scheme's own rules, write to the Programme Coordinator, Overseas VDF, Science and Engineering Research Board, Block II, Technology Bhavan, New Mehrauli Road, New Delhi, at ovdf@serb.gov.in, on 011 2655 2210 or 011 2655 2135 (Overseas Visiting Doctoral Fellowship, Anusandhan National Research Foundation). The consolidated research networking listing puts Dr. Praveen Kumar S, Scientist F, in the programme coordinator column against OVDF (Research Networking, Anusandhan National Research Foundation).

Source

Official links

Frequently asked questions

From the official scheme FAQ (myScheme)

Read this

Disclaimer

Disclaimer

Scheme details are compiled from myScheme, the Government of India’s official scheme-discovery platform, and are reproduced without alteration. Amounts, deadlines and eligibility change between cycles, so always confirm on the official links above before applying. Expertie does not process applications or charge fees.

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