When it comes to university rankings, the Vice-Chancellor of Utkal University feels that India has adopted an Euro-centric approach towards NIRF (National Institutional Ranking Framework) data that favours only the elite institutions in the country. NIRF is a methodology adopted by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, to rank institutions of higher education in India. Depending upon these rankings, the policymakers decide on the quantum of funds to be allocated to the various institutes or universities in the country.
The VC made this observation at a conference titled 'Institutional Ranking - The Importance of data', jointly-organised by Utkal University and Elsevier, an information analytics company. The event was held at hotel Swosti Premium on September 4.
"We have to create situations in which NIRF rankings become sensitive to the local conditions. For instance, if an article is published in any regional language in a prestigious journal, it should be taken into account for NIRF ranking and get reflected in Scopus (abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature)," said VC Soumendra Patnaik.
The VC also argued that NIRF ranking should also re-consider its parameter of presence of foreign students and expand its ambit to include inter-state students. "The word foreign or international should be linked up with cosmopolitanism. If the regional universities have students from other states, they should also get some mileage in the NIRF ranking," he added.
The conference featured high-level representatives from leading universities, institutes, research organizations and Elsevier. The participants discussed about the evolving expectations on universities, university rankings (QS Ranking, THE Ranking, NIRF), importance of data in rankings, strategies and best practices that together help to build a world-class research university.
Vinod Kaw, Regional Head South Asia of Elsevier, talked about the importance of setting the benchmark to achieve the goal set by the institutes for themselves. As the session progressed, Kavit Yagnik, Head Research Intelligence, shared insights on how major universities in Australia and Singapore are using Information Analytics tools like Scopus and Scival for Research Data Assessment. Franscisco from World Bank talked about the partnership of the world bank and higher education council to support the education in India.
Ganpati Yadav from Institute of Chemical Technology (ICT) Mumbai shared his experience about approaches to enhance research output. Nitin Karmalkar from Savitribai Phule Pune university talked about the industry academic collaboration to improve the research output.
There was an open forum discussion on the 'challenges and opportunities in the data-laden world for research intensive universities'.