How to make Indian varsities world-class? 

As Prakash Javadekar takes charge of a ministry that appeared to impede the Prime Minister’s desire to see world-class Indian universities, step one could be to get his ministry’s first-ever national ranking in order.

The Ministry of Human Resource Development’s India Rankings 2016 - a guide for students - lacks three key criteria used in prestigious university ranking exercises globally, such as Times Higher Education World University Rankings, a list of the world’s best universities, compiled since 2004.

The Indian criteria, listed in the National Institutional Ranking Framework, lacks information on doctorates awarded, institutional income and global reputation of Indian universities, which, in general, fall short on faculty-student, male-female and international-local student ratios, according to an IndiaSpend analysis.

The world’s best university, according to The Times’ rankings, is the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech. India’s best, the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, is ranked between 251 and 300 - universities are banded after the first 200 ranks - the only Indian higher-education institution in the top 300.

China is the only BRICS economy with three universities in the Times’ top 100 universities list: Peking University (42), University of Hong Kong (44) and Tsinghua University (47). Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants 10 public and private institutions to be world-class teaching and research institutions over the next five years, “to allow ordinary Indians access to affordable world-class degree courses”, but that is inadequate for a country where 33.3 million students were enrolled in 716 universities and 38,056 colleges, according to the 2014-15 All India Survey on Higher Education.

What’s missing in India Rankings 2016 India Rankings ignored the number of doctorates awarded, important criteria to indicate “how committed an institution is to nurturing the next generation of academics” and “the provision of teaching at the highest level that is thus attractive to graduates and effective at developing them”, according to the Times Higher Education criteria.

India had 20,425 and 22,849 enrolments in master’s and doctoral programmes, respectively, in 2013, making up 0.67 per cent of all higher-education enrolments, when it should ideally be five per cent, according to Furqan Qamar, secretary general, Association of Indian Universities.

Too few of these enrolments were in engineering/technology (5.9 per cent), medicine/health sciences (two per cent) and agricultural sciences/technology (two per cent), “disciplines that are typically associated with applied research and which therefore, go on to further technological advancement,” said Qamar. Most were in pure sciences (32 per cent) and arts/social sciences/humanities (35 per cent).

Income of any kind is absent from the India Rankings framework for universities. Times Higher Education considers institutional income, to provide “a broad sense of the infrastructure and facilities available to students and staff”; research income, “crucial to the development of world-class research”; and industry income to capture “the extent to which businesses are willing to pay for research and a university’s ability to attract funding in the commercial marketplace.”

Likewise, assessing industry income would show the disparity between Indian academic research aims and industry needs. “In developed nations, industry looks to universities for new ideas for potential use in the future. Indian industry is more demanding; it looks for problem-specific research that ends in almost a prototype of the device or process, so that product development can quickly ensue,” said Bishnu P Pal, a professor at the School of Natural Sciences, Mahindra Ecole Centrale, the Mahindra group’s engineering college in Hyderabad.

Most research in Indian universities is by doctoral students for their thesis, said Pal. A global reputation survey result makes up 50 per cent of the Times survey’s teaching score and 60 per cent of the research score. To evaluate institutional reputation, India Rankings engages with all sorts of stakeholders in India. This is not enough, said experts. Indian universities must get known for excellence overseas.

Weak spots measured in India Rankings 2016
Faculty-student ratio: IISc has a staff-to-student ratio comparable with the world’s best, 1:8.2 versus Caltech’s 1:6.9. However, Indian institutions lower down the order fared poorly. For instance, Delhi University, ranked sixth in India and in Times’ 601-to-800 rank band, had a faculty student ratio of 1:22.9. (In arrangement with IndiaSpend.org)

By Charu Bahri