24 more private, government institutes up for ‘eminence’ tag

A committee of experts headed by former chief election commissioner N Gopalaswami has recommended the coveted ‘Institute of Eminence’ tag for 12 private institutions and as many government ones as part of an ambitious government plan under which they will be nurtured into world class centres of education.

Krea University (Sri City), Shiv Nadar University (Dadri) and Vellore Institute of Technology (Vellore) are among the private institutions chosen by the committee, which also picked Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Madras, Delhi University, Jadavpur University and Banaras Hindu University (BHU) among the publicly funded institutions.

The Narendra Modi government tasked the four-member panel headed by Goplaswami to select 20 ‘institutes of eminence’ as part of the initiative to build world class educational centres.

The panel, on whose recommendation three government and three private institutes had been selected, came up with its second list on Friday and suggested a new category of outstanding sectoral institutions.

As part of the new special list, it zeroed in on the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM)-Ahmedabad and Kolkata, for outstanding sectoral institutions in management studies.

Delhi’s Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and Punjab Agriculture University (PAU), Ludhiana, were selected in the field of agricultural studies.

The Gopalaswami committee suggested that they be given a special tag, say ‘institutions of excellence’ or similar, in recognition of their stellar performance in these sectors, an official in the ministry of human resource development said on condition of anonymity. The panel also named the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Kolkata, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Re– search (TIFR), Mumbai, and the Institute of Chemical Technology (ICT), Mumbai, and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, as outstanding sectoral institutions in this list.

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