A need was felt to establish a nationally cohesive, interdisciplinary Ph.D. programme in biosciences to expand the scale of generating highly skilled, globally competitive human resource. It was envisioned that the trained human resource produced through this programme would be better equipped to provide bioscience-based pioneering solutions to contemporary problems relevant nationally and globally. The main objective of the proposed programme would be to foster greater academic and research interaction among the institutions of the DBT BRIC (iBRICs), RCB and ICGEB, and to increase the professional networking opportunities for the Ph.D. scholars.