NEW DELHI: Protests, masked mobs, police ‘inaction’, Right vs Left, vice-chancellor vs students… and one of India’s best institutes for higher education and research — that’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Headlines on JNU may frequently centre around agitation and student politics, but the big story is that it’s currently one of India’s top-ranked academic institutes and has been so in recent annual rankings.
JNU is the only central university, in fact the only varsity, among top eight Indian institutes in the 2019 National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF). This HRD ministry ranking system, widely followed in the country, had IIT-Madras at the top spot in 2019, and the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, in second position. JNU is at the seventh spot. The other five places in the top eight were occupied by the IITs.
The NIRF, launched in September 2015 by the HRD ministry, ranks institutional performance on the parameters of “teaching, learning and resources”, “research and professional practices”, “graduation outcomes”, “outreach and inclusivity”, and “perception”. It assigns scores to every institute (see graphic).
The ranking methodology assesses an institute’s student strength (including at doctoral levels), teacher-student ratio, published and granted patents, number of PhDs, percentage of students who are from other states and disadvantaged sections and who are women, besides perception of academic peers.
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JNU’s academic performance has improved as the frequency and intensity of student agitations gathered pace in recent years. The university has been rocked by protests since 2016, and it has improved its overall score in the NIRF from 61.53 in 2017 to 68.8 in 2019.
In 2017, JNU also won the President’s Visitor’s Award for the best university.
Interestingly, other universities that have seen student protests and agitations recently — Jamia Millia Islamia, Aligarh Muslim University, Hyderabad University and Jadavpur University — also score well in rankings.
In the NIRF’s university rankings — a smaller subset that exclude institutes such as IITs — JNU came second in 2019, Hyderabad University stood fourth and Jadavpur University was sixth. Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia were at the 11th and 12th spots, respectively.
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Since 2016, JNU academics have been conferred with various Visitor’s Awards. And in 2015, still fresh from the student agitation over Rohit Vemula’s suicide, Hyderabad University won the Visitor’s Award for best university. Academics from both Jamia and AMU have also won the Visitor’s Awards since 2015, when these awards were introduced.
