The all-India ranking for higher education institutions in the country released by the human resource development (HRD) ministry last week is being seen as a big step in improving the quality of education imparted by Indian universities. It also aims to make these universities globally competitive. While 100 institutions each were ranked under the university and engineering categories, 50 each were ranked in management (research and teaching) and pharmacy (research and teaching) categories.
Prominent names missing from the list
One of the surprise elements was that some prominent institutions in different disciplines were missing in the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF). These include Delhi Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Research, National Law School of India University (Bengaluru), Faculty of Management Studies (Delhi), National Institute of Design (Ahmedabad), Mudra Institute of Communication (Ahmedabad), Indian Institute of Mass Communication (Delhi/Dhenkanal) and School of Planning and Architecture (Delhi and others).
The rankings were arrived at after detailed analysis and validation of the data submitted by more than 3,600 higher educational institutions in the country classified in six categories. These rankings followed an Indian approach, where an academic institute was assessed on parameters, including teaching-learning; research; collaborative practice and professional performance; graduate outcomes; placements; outreach and inclusive action and peer group perception. Each of these was subdivided into nearly 20 sub criteria to comprehensively assess an institution.
Citing reasons for prominent names not making the cut, Ashok Thakur, former secretary to the government of India, department of higher education, HRD ministry, says, “This is the first year of NIRF and it is possible that many institutions, including some very good ones could not participate or could not upload complete information. For example, in the category of universities, though we have more than 740 in the country, only about 250 of them participated.”
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Data verification a big challenge
The general nature of the NIRF rankings also brings into question the verification of data. Prasad says, “This was one of the biggest challenges for us operationally. Data-based objective rankings can be only as good as the quality of the underlying data. Enormous effort was spent on making sure that data are scrutinised carefully to remove as many inconsistencies as we could spot. We used some automation (statistical tools), but more importantly a large number of senior volunteers (without a conflict of interest) for this purpose. Wherever available, we used data from independent sources. Wherever data collected from institutions was used, they went through very strict scrutiny. Wherever we did not have confidence, we desisted from doing a ranking. That is another reason, we did not rank all categories.”