Three Chandigarh colleges in top 100 of NIRF, MCM DAV losing out in the race

Chandigarh : Three colleges of Chandigarh have bagged space in the top 100 colleges of the country this year under National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) of Ministry of Human Resource Development. Government Home Science College came at 72 , Goswami Ganesh Dutta Sanatan Dharma College (GGDSD) at 99 and PEC University of Technology at 78 position in the category of engineering colleges.

Then there are renowned colleges like MCMDAV which could not make in the list. Nisha Bhardwaj, principal of MCMDAV college told TOI, “It was only our college which made to NIRF from Chandigarh at 74 ^th position in 2017. Now we are at loss to understand the reasons for not being considered in the ranking anymore so I am planning to write to HRD ministry on this issue.” She said that her college has been in the lead in social and environment sector giving examples of bagging first position in GOI’s Swachch Survekshan competition last year in the category for residential colleges in the country, and Chandigarh getting third position in the same competition this year for her college’s project of growing mushrooms in plastic bottles.

Shabana Gandhi, faculty member of Government Home Science College said that the college has done well in all the five categories of NIRF. “Under the first parameter of Teaching, Learning and Resource, we have been able to start three PHD streams in Foods and Nutrition, Human Development and Family Relation and Clothing & Textile, after Punjab University approved our research center for PHD course,” she said. She said that college too has been paying lot of attention in preparing first hand data with lot of thesis work which helped it to score well in the second category of Research and Professional Practice.

Sudha Katyal, principal credited thrust on imparting entrepreneurship skills to the students , which college mentioned about in the third category of Graduation Outcomes saying that most of their students became successful dieticians in the hospitals and health centers. For the fourth category of Outreach and Inclusivity, she said that college has reserved 30% of its total seats for outsiders. To improve its ranking, she said that college management would further expand its research work to better its score for next year.

JD Sharma head of center for information and media in PEC University of Technology was of the view that the core management of the college is seriously considering of long term measures to improve its ranking. “We have begun working in the direction of improving our score in the category of Research and Professional Practice by increasing our budget for research by almost five to six times this year. The core management is planning to chalk out similar measures to keep up at the top in NIRF,” he said.

GGDSD college has barely managed to be in ranking at 99th position. According to faculty member Naveen Dalal, the college had obtained 82 position last year and 41 in 2017. For this shift in the college’s position in NIRF , he reasoned, “There have been some changes in the parameters of NIRF in last couple of years which has been the reason that we lost out on our strong points. However we are hopeful to further capture our lost top positions with more number of PHD graduates passing our from our institute.” He further added that the college has managed to stay in the ranking for various reasons which include that 80% of college faculty is PHD qualified ; teachers’ publications published in journals at international level such as Web of Science; on an average students bagging good placement at package of Rs three-four lakh per annum with almost 100 % pass percentage of college.