In its endeavor to bridge the industry-academia gap, Yahoo! Labs has recently launched an

RELATED ARTICLES For IIT, B-school graduates, job outlook remains bright

initiative in which it will allow some of its employees to pursue PhD in computer science from reputed institutes, while providing them with hefty stipends worth Rs 1,00,000 a month.

Speaking about the initiative, Rajeev Rastogi, VP and head of Yahoo! Labs said, “At present we have partnered with top Indian universities like IIT Mumbai and IIT Madras and are in talks with the other IITs as well as IISc for the same.”

According to Rastogi, Yahoo! launched this programme three months back and will identify a few employees with research potential and good performance. “These employees will be paid a hefty monthly stipend which is on a par with the stipends given by US universities. Unlike other companies that offer similar programme, the employees at Yahoo! can focus on their course without having to do the company work during these four years of research,” he added.

This year the company has selected two employees for the programme and this number will vary in the coming years. “We started this programme as we wanted to give talented students a platform to pursue higher education. One of the biggest problems why so few people enroll for PhD’s is the meager stipends they get. The amount we are offering will encourage and attract a lot of desirable candidates to pursue research studies,” Rastogi said.