Government Makes New System of Ranking Educational Institutions

The Human Resource Development Ministry will ask educational institutions to publish data like number of teachers, infrastructure and students among others on their own websites. The general audiences will now have a say in the government rankings awarded to these institutions. This is an attempt to ensure greater transparency and check inaccurate data furnished by colleges and universities.
The general public and stake holders will then be asked to study the data & provide feedback to the National Accreditation Bureau under the HRD Ministry in case of any difference. “All the institutions will be asked to provide relevant data in a particular format which will be available on the National Institute Ranking Framework (NIRF). Also, the submitted data for the last three years will be uploaded on their own, publicly visible website in the interest of transparency,” said a senior HRD official.
Since the ministry does not carry out physical checks on its own, last year, a number of institutions had withheld information and/or provided incorrect data to obtain a good ranking. From 2017, colleges will be ranked and there will be just one common award from the government irrespective of the specialization or branch.
Explaining the procedure, a senior official said all candidate institutions, independent of their discipline or nature (university, engineering institution, law or medical institution) will be given a common overall rank. The parameters have been chosen in such a manner that they remain equally important for all kinds of educational institutions.
“The format will be designed to ensure that the diversity of disciplines and their separate needs or characters are suitably taken care of,” the official said.