India-Specific Ranking System For Educational Institutions: MHRD

Government comes up with an indigenous ranking framework for engineering and management institutes.

The central government is all set to unveil an India-specific ranking framework covering higher educational institutes. The HRD Ministry has come up with an indigenous ranking framework for engineering and management institutes.

This is an answer for the global private ranking agencies to which most of the Indian institutions including IITs have never been able to make to the list. The first ranking list of all private and government institutes will be out by April next year.

"It is a revolutionary step. Before the next academic year, we will manage to give our students a plethora of choices on the basis of the national framework, which is very transparent, which engages not only the institutes, regulators but the citizens at large," Union HRD Minister Smriti Irani said while releasing the framework.

The ranking framework will be across disciplines which takes into account the perception of an institute, outreach, research activity and inclusivity through reservations. It will be released by HRD Minister Smriti Irani following a series of meetings of a core committee headed by the HRD Ministry higher education Secretary.

An official note stated that the framework which would be used for ranking is "teaching learning and resources, research, consulting and collaborative performance, graduation outcome, outreach and inclusivity (through reservations) and perception." Each of these has been further subdivided into nearly 20 sub criteria to comprehensively assess an institute.

The rankings will cover all institutes offering courses on engineering, law, management and humanities and the first ranking list is expected by January-February 2016. A core committee comprised National Board of Accreditation Chairman (NBA) Surendra Prasad, IIT-Kharagapur Director P.P. Chakraborty, IIT-Madras Director Bhaskar Ramamurthi, besides the higher education secretary and HRD ministry officials.

Prasad said that, "The methodology outlined would start a new era of accountability in higher education in the country."

With the underlining theme that the ranking be designed that enable an apple-to-apple comparison, it has been decided that institutes in different sectoral field such as engineering, management etc. would be compared separately. Comprehensive universities comprising several academic programmes in Arts, Humanities, Science etc should similarly be compared separately.