Delhi University colleges apply for national ranking

In a bid to save face for central government's institutional ranking, National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), the government has persuaded top education institutions to apply this year.

Top Delhi University colleges like Hindu, Hansraj, Ramjas and St. Stephens that had not applied for NIRF last year, have come on board this year to apply in the college category.

According to sources, it was after much persuasion from the Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) and the concerned unit - National Board of Accreditation (NBA) conducting NIRF, that the institutions have applied this year. The ministry felt the need to persuade these colleges and others that had not applied as 2017 list of colleges was not impressive which raised a question mark on the government ranking itself.

"Many good colleges had not applied for NIRF last year, and hence we could not rank them. This, in turn, ended up giving a list which was not very impressive. People started questioning as to why colleges like St. Stephens were not in the top list. We could not go on explaining to everybody the reason for the absence of these colleges, hence this year we decided to persuade them and bring them on board for applying," said a senior official in HRD Ministry.

"There was a lot of discussion in the ministry about the kind of colleges that could be ranked in NIRF because we all know the reality. We were quite sure that a college like Atma Ram Sanatan Dharam (ARSD) from Delhi University could not have been at number 5 in the overall list of colleges in the country, but we could not place any other good college there because not many had applied," the official added.

The official informed that the colleges themselves recognised the need of being ranked in NIRF as the government is linking a lot of facilities, like funding and granting of "Institute of national eminence" tag to these rankings.

The official, further, informed that participation has gone up this year."October 16 was the last day for registration and we can say that the number of applications has almost gone by up by 50 per cent this year."

In a related move, the government is planning to end public perception criteria while ranking the colleges. Till this year, perception, which is one of the categories to rank colleges, also included public perception. But it was found out that colleges are using agencies to fill up public perception for them to score more in that criteria, hence this will be done away with for the next rankings, an official informed.

Starting government's own ranking was an idea conceptualized by former HRD Minister Smriti Irani in 2015.

REALISATION

• An HRD ministry official said that the colleges themselves recognised the need to be ranked in NIRF as the government is linking a lot of facilities, like funding and granting of “Institute of national eminence” tag to these rankings.