Provide full autonomy to NIRF top 10 institutions: Former IIT Delhi Director

Prof V. Ramgopal Rao has suggested a peer review process to remove complaints, and doubts around data submission in NIRF Rankings

The former Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Director has suggested a peer review process to remove doubts around data submission by institutions in the NIRF (National Institutional Ranking Framework). The Education Ministry announced NIRF India Rankings 2022 last week in which IIT Madras was ranked best in the Overall category, and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) was ranked as the best university in the country.

Prof V. Ramgopal Rao, former IIT Delhi director has suggested six points to further improve the NIRF ranking framework. He has suggested that ranking institutions every year is a bit of an overkill. “Rankings can be done once every 2 years. Nothing much changes in any Institute every year,” Prof Rao writes.

Removing complaints related to NIRF Data submission

Since its inception, there have been doubts around the data submitted by institutions in the NIRF Rankings, many of the institutions have pointed towards and on several occasions, the NIRF also downgraded the ranking of institutions or removed it from the table after the data were found to be wrong, but that usually happened months after NIRF Rankings were announced.

To get rid of this problem, Prof Rao suggests introducing a peer review process into the entire ranking system. According to him, the institute ranked below must verify the authenticity of the data submitted by the institute ranked above. He writes: “That way, they get to learn more about the institution ranked above and learn from their best practices. Since all data will be verified by a peer institution, there will be much better transparency in the process.”

While suggesting making NIRF a two-year process instead of the current annual rankings, he writes that in this two-year cycle, even the data verification can be completed following the peer review process.

Making NIRF International

Prof Rao, who is currently serving as Chair Professor at the IIT Delhi suggests creating a parallel NIRF Plus or NIRF international and rank the top 50 NIRF institutions with the best 50 institutions in the world.

“Time has come to create new goal posts now. Otherwise, it will be a sort of musical chairs at the top and will be a zero-sum game for the country. The parameters for the international benchmarking can be taken from publicly available data for these international institutions (viz., Faculty-student ratio, Research budgets normalized to PPP, Cost of Education etc.) and data that can be independently sourced (Research publications, Research impact from citations, patents granted etc.),” he writes.

Autonomy to top 10 to compete at global level

Competition and Autonomy need to go hand in hand. He suggests that IITs and NITs which are ranked among the top 10 consistently for 3 years must receive full autonomy, along the lines of IIMs. “As I mentioned in my earlier post, one can always develop a proper financial model for these Institutions which can be linked to their performance. The grants can be provided as subsidy per student. Without autonomy, these institutions will never be able to compete internationally,” Rao writes.

He also suggests having "funded" research & educational schemes for Tier-1 institutions in NIRF to collaborate with Tier-2 institutions. These collaborative funding schemes can be operated by the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Science & Technology, which have this mandate. He writes that unless there is funding made available through national-level schemes to encourage such collaborations, the good Institutions will keep getting better and hog all the competitive research grants. “As a country, it will be a disaster. Unless the entire education/research eco-system improves, the impact will not be visible. Every child in the country deserves the best quality education,” writes Prof Rao.

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