The Centre has set the ball rolling for a more comprehensive ranking of higher educational institutions in the next round of the National Institutional Ranking Framework in 2018.
The idea: instead of institutions choosing to take part in the exercise, they are being auto-registered through a large online database — the All-India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) portal — of institutions available with the Ministry of Human Resource Development.
The institutions, however, have to provide details like patents, publications, research projects and campus placements that are not available on the portal.
The NIRF — begun in 2016 — ranks higher educational institutions in India on the basis of a variety of parameters. The idea is to be able to gauge their relative standing and also help students make informed career choices.
The 2016 and 2017 NIRF lists reflected the ranks of only those institutions that had taken part in the exercise.
The number was about 3300 in 2017.
Among universities, Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore was ranked first and Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi was second.
Miranda House in Delhi was ranked India’s best college.
Many top colleges like St Stephens College, Delhi; Hindu College, Delhi; Delhi School of Economics; Ramjas College, Delhi; and Hansraj College, Delhi, did not take part in the exercise. With the changed process, such institutions will be part of the next year’s list.
With this, the number of institutions that will figure in the NIRF exercise is expected to jump three-fold to at least 10,000, an official said.