Global rankings not transparent
To promote excellence in academic institutes, India is all set to get its own university rankings as the ministry of human resource development launches the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) on April 4 in Delhi. Partha Pratim Chakrabarti, professor and director IIT Kharagpur, who has played a role in designing the framework of the rankings, talks about the need for such rankings and the process.
Why the need for Indian rankings?
International rankings were not suitable for such a large multicultural nation like India with thousands of institutions and with several unique national features. For institutes like IITs or Delhi University or Punjab University, achieving high scores for the research component is not difficult. But the component of internationalisation will not work for IITs as they cannot, by law, have large number of international students at the undergraduate level. Also some international rankings have a very high weightage on perception. Global rankings are therefore very nontransparent due to a large perception weight-age rather than measurable data. Also they will never provide you the detailed absolute data about how other institutes have performed. I have no way to find out how my institute has performed vis-a-vis the competition in terms of absolute data. In the Indian rankings, I am given to understand that NIRF will make the data available for all to see, to enable institutes to improve their act. Also, we feel if all the information is transparent and available then there’s limited scope for falsification. Now, for the NIRF portal, more than 3,000 institutes have registered. The data will be available for all to see and analyse. Also we will rank institutes in various categories that are relevant to India.
How will academic institutes benefit?
If India has to rank 30,000 institutions, maybe we will start with 10% now and later enable participation of all institutes. Parameters have to be carefully chosen and categorised. India is unique. Do you know that district courts still practice law in the vernacular? If you start creating national law schools, you also have to develop institutes that teach in vernacular too. We have to rank such institutes properly for their quality and not impose English on them. We need to provide other institutes the scope for participation, tell them what the parameters are. We need to tell them that they have to move progressively too.