Is Indian English Acceptable in a PhD Thesis? What Examiners Actually Flag (2026)

Yes — but only in the sense that no examiner will fail you for being Indian. What gets marked is register, not nationality. A thesis is written in formal academic English, and a handful of constructions that are completely normal in Indian offices, emails and classrooms belong to a different register. They read as informal or as errors to an examiner, and under the UGC Ph.D. Regulations at least one of your examiners may not be Indian at all.

This is not a style-guide lecture. Below is the specific list of constructions that get circled in Indian theses, the reason each one is circled, the replacement, and a one-hour find-and-fix pass you can run on a finished draft tonight.

Is Indian English a mistake?

No. Indian English is an established variety with its own vocabulary, its own idiom and roughly a billion speakers in its orbit. Nothing on this page is an argument that you should write like a British undergraduate.

The distinction that matters is between a variety and a register. Variety is which English you speak. Register is how formal the situation is. Indian English, like every other English, has a casual register, a bureaucratic register and an academic register — and the constructions below are mostly casual or bureaucratic ones that migrate into theses because they are the English a scholar writes all day in email.

An examiner reading “kindly refer the same” in Chapter 3 is not detecting your nationality. They are detecting that the sentence was written in the register of an office memo.

Which constructions do examiners actually mark?

These are the ones that recur. The middle column is the reason it is marked, which matters more than the replacement, because the reason generalises to sentences not on this list.

Two patterns account for most of the table. The first is a preposition attached to a verb that does not take one — discuss about, emphasise on, comprise of, cope up with, order for, request for. The second is correspondence vocabulary — kindly, the same, revert, do the needful, respected. If you learn only those two patterns you will catch sentences this table does not list.

Why does an external examiner outside India change the calculation?

Because the UGC has written the possibility into the Regulations. On the appointment of examiners, the 2022 gazette says, verbatim:

“Wherever possible, one of the external examiners should be chosen from outside India.”

Read that clause carefully. It is a recommendation, not a mandate, and plenty of Indian theses are examined entirely within the country. But the whole design of the evaluation — two external examiners who are not employees of your institution, at least one of whom your department will try to source internationally — means you cannot assume your reader shares your idiom. The stage-by-stage process, including who those examiners are and what happens if one of them objects, is set out in our guide to what happens in a PhD viva voce in India.

The practical consequence is narrow and specific. A sentence that is merely informal costs you a comment. A sentence that is unintelligible to a reader outside India costs you a query, and queries cost weeks.

What about lakh, crore and the Indian numbering system?

This one is not a register problem, it is a comprehension problem, and it has a clean solution: state the figure both ways on first use, then pick one and stay with it.

“The scheme disbursed ₹250 crore (₹2.5 billion) in 2024–25” is unambiguous to every reader. So is a table that carries a note reading “All figures in ₹ lakh (1 lakh = 100,000)”. What is not unambiguous is a results table full of unexplained lakh values, and what is worse is a document that switches between the two systems between chapters.

The same discipline applies to the digit grouping. Indian grouping writes 12,34,567 where international grouping writes 1,234,567. Whichever you choose, apply it to every number in the document — the consistency rules that govern this and the rest of your presentation are covered in our guide to formatting a thesis as per UGC guidelines, which also explains which of these rules come from the UGC and which come from your own ordinance.

Where does the present continuous go wrong?

Indian English uses the present continuous with verbs that standard academic English keeps in the simple present: I am having a doubt, the model is showing that, we are knowing from the literature. In a thesis this reads as informal, and in the results chapter it also reads as tentative when you mean to be definite.

The repair is mechanical. Search your document for ” is showing”, ” are showing”, ” is having”, ” are having”, ” am having”, ” is knowing”, ” are knowing” and ” is consisting”. Almost every hit becomes a simple present or a simple past: the model shows, the sample consists of, respondents were uncertain.

Tense choice in general is a separate question from register, and it is chapter-specific rather than nation-specific — the proposal is written forward and the finished document backward, a conversion set out in our guide to writing a PhD synopsis for your doctoral committee.

Which “polite” words belong in a letter and not in a thesis?

All of them. A thesis has no addressee. It does not thank the reader mid-chapter, it does not request, and it does not apologise for its own length.

Delete on sight: kindly, respected, please note, we humbly submit, the author would like to state, it is worth mentioning here that. The last two are not Indianisms at all — they are throat-clearing, and every thesis in every country carries too many of them — but they cluster in the same paragraphs as the rest, so you may as well remove them in the same pass.

There is one legitimate home for warmth of this kind, and that is the acknowledgements. Nobody has ever been marked down for a warm acknowledgements page.

How do you find these in your own draft in one hour?

1. Build the search list. Copy the left-hand column of the table above, plus the continuous-tense strings, into a plain list. Sixteen table entries plus eight tense strings is twenty-four searches.
2. Search, do not read. Use your editor’s find function on the whole document, one string at a time. Reading for these constructions does not work, because they are invisible to the person who wrote them — that is exactly why they survived the draft.
3. Fix in place, one string at a time. Do not “improve” the surrounding sentence while you are there. Mixing a register pass with a content pass is how a clean chapter acquires a new error.
4. Run a second pass for the two patterns, not the words. Search for about, on and of immediately after a verb, and for the word same. This catches the constructions the list does not name.
5. Read your abstract aloud. One page, out loud, slowly. The abstract is read first, quoted most and revised least, and it is where a single “kindly” does disproportionate damage.

Expect roughly forty to eighty hits in a full thesis. That is normal and it says nothing about the quality of your research.

What should you not change?

A surprising amount, and this matters as much as the list above.

Keep Indian spellings if your ordinance uses them. Most Indian universities follow British spelling — analyse, behaviour, programme. That is a house style, not an error, and switching to American spelling to please an imagined foreign reader is the wrong instinct. Be consistent and follow your own institution.

Keep Indian terms of art. Panchayat, ryot, kharif, anganwadi, gram sabha, SHG, PDS — these are the correct technical names for the things you studied. Gloss each one on first use in a clause and then use it freely. Replacing them with vague English paraphrase makes the thesis worse and less citable.

Keep Indian data, Indian sources and Indian context. The register pass is about sentences. It is not an instruction to internationalise your subject matter, and a literature review that suppresses Indian scholarship to look global is a weaker review — the case for building the chapter the other way round is made in our guide to writing a literature review for a PhD thesis in India.

Getting the register right while you draft, not after

Everything above is a repair pass, and repair passes are expensive because they happen when you are already tired and already late. The cheaper version is to write in academic register from the first draft, which is mostly a matter of having the right sentence patterns available at the moment you need them.

Tesify drafts your chapters in formal academic English from your own material and your own sources, so the constructions on this page do not enter the document in the first place — and every citation stays bound to a real reference as the chapter grows. The research, the argument and the responsibility remain entirely yours.

Start writing your thesis with Tesify

Frequently asked questions

Will an examiner fail my thesis for Indian English?

No. Register issues produce comments and minor corrections, not rejection. A thesis fails on its research — its design, its evidence and its contribution — not on whether Chapter 3 says “as per”. What informal register does cost you is credibility in the reader’s first ten pages, which is a real but recoverable cost.

Should I write in British or American English in an Indian thesis?

Follow your university’s ordinance, and if it is silent, use British spelling, which is the convention at most Indian institutions. Consistency matters far more than the choice. A document that mixes “analyse” and “analyze” looks unedited regardless of which one an examiner prefers.

Is “as per” actually wrong?

It is not ungrammatical. It is register-marked: it belongs to administrative and legal writing rather than academic prose, and it appears in Indian theses far more often than in international journals. “According to” or “in accordance with” costs you nothing and reads as academic everywhere.

Can I use lakh and crore in my thesis?

Yes, provided you define the unit on first use and stay consistent. Give the international equivalent in brackets the first time and add a note to any table that uses the unit. The failure mode is not the unit itself but a document that switches systems between chapters.

Do these rules apply to an M.Tech or M.Phil dissertation too?

Yes, and to a postgraduate project report. The register of formal academic writing does not change with the level of the degree. What changes is how closely it is read, and a PhD thesis with two external examiners is read the most closely of the three.

My guide writes this way. Should I copy my guide?

Copy your guide on argument, method and disciplinary convention, which is what supervision is for. Do not copy correspondence vocabulary from an email into a chapter. If your guide edits a sentence into administrative register, leave it — the relationship costs more than the sentence saves.

Does a language editor fix this?

A good one does, and it is the single most useful thing an editor does for an Indian thesis. Agree in writing that the editor may change wording but not content, keep the tracked-changes file, and check whether your ordinance requires you to declare that the document was language-edited.

Will a grammar checker catch these?

Partially. Automated checkers reliably catch “cope up with” and “discuss about” but routinely pass “kindly”, “the same” and “as per”, because those are grammatical. The find-and-replace list above exists precisely because the checker cannot see register.

Is it a problem in the viva as well as in writing?

Much less. A viva is spoken, spoken register is legitimately different, and no examiner has ever objected to a scholar saying “kindly” out loud. Concentrate the effort on the document.

How much of my thesis will this pass change?

Very little of it by volume — typically forty to eighty short substitutions across a full thesis, almost all of them one or two words. That is the reason this is worth doing: it is one of the highest-return hours available to you in the last month before submission.

Should I remove Indian examples to appeal to a foreign examiner?

No, and doing so usually weakens the thesis. An examiner from outside India is appointed for disciplinary expertise, not because your subject should be less Indian. Gloss local terms and institutions on first use and keep everything else.