Institute of Eminence Report

In the last one week, a lot has been said about the Institute of Eminence process and report. There are far too many questions about the way this policy has been handled. And my take on this is, that it may have been strategic. Make so many errors, violate your own policy so many times, that different people will comment on different issues and there would not be one single issue on which all the people are united in criticism.

The report that has been made public on UGC website says nothing about how specifically these institutes were decided. There are a lot of general things that they say (but do not seem to follow themselves). When I was reading the report, I was repeatedly asking myself, if this is a competence issue, or is it that they were not willing to spend enough time on such an important assignment (after all, other than the chairperson, members are extremely busy people, but then they should have refused to be a member rather than sign such a poor report).

The report clearly says that the primary goal of the committee was to look for universities which would be in top 500 of any popular world ranking within 10 years. One would have assumed that those universities which are already in top 500 would be automatically selected, unless this committee is convinced that those universities have seen their zenith, and are now on the declining path, and in the next 10 years, they will be out of top 500 list. And if committee is convinced of this, it would actually give reason for the same. So what is the basis of keeping IIT Kanpur out is not clear.

The committee talks about private institutions not doing enough research and hence the possibility of them getting into top 500 is less. And then, it ignores the private university which arguably has the best research output (Amritha University) and because of this research output they already have comparable or better ranking in various lists compared with the two private universities that have indeed been selected. There was certainly a possibility of having the 4th private university in the list.

In the report, they mention that some of the newer universities are so small (less than 3000 students) that they couldn't really become world class, but at the same time recommend a university with 0 students to be in the list. Also, when the goal is to have a university in top 500 in 10 years, how come a university which is claiming to be in top 500 in 13 years has been selected. Jio University seems to have suggested that it will start in 2021 and will be in top 500 by 2031. Based on their only higher education venture (DAIICT) which is nowhere in the world rankings even after 20 years, it seems difficult to believe that they will be in top 500 within 10 years of starting, but in any case, the goal was 10 years from the selection, and they themselves are saying that they will not be in top 500 within 10 years from selection. For a good analysis of this decision, read the following report by Prof. Sandeep Shukla.
Money cannot buy excellence in education, but Jio's 'Eminence' tag is worth crores.

This is not to say that Mr. Ambani cannot be the promoter of a great university. I hope Jio will be one. But as of today, there is no reason to believe that they will be in top 500 within 10 years. Indeed they themselves are saying that they won't be. So the tag is clearly misplaced.

(People are too sensitive. When I say DAIICT is not in world ranking, I am saying only that much. I am not saying that it is a bad institute. It is a good institute, but not in top 500 ranks in the world.)

The committee says that many universities applied only to get autonomy from UGC and they can be dealt with within the graded autonomy regulations. But why should that be an issue. My motivation may be to gain autonomy, but you please look at me from the perspective whether I can get into top 500 ranks in the next 10 years or not.

The committee has recommended 8 public universities. When they had space for 2 more, they have still decided to ignore those universities which are already in top 500 list, the primary goal as stated by the committee. One would have expected an explanation in the report (and not now to the media, even that is not forthcoming on this issue though).

On what basis has government chosen 3 out of 8. There appears to be some feedback from the committee, since the Chairman of the committee has said that IIT Madras was not selected because Chennai has bad weather because of which international students and faculty don't come to Chennai and hence their international ranking is poor.. Gimme a break. Weather in Chennai much different from Mumbai? And other IITs have a large number of international students and faculty members?

IIT Kanpur is a curious case. Not only it is not in the list of 8 universities, it is not even in the list of specialized universities focusing on science and technology. A university which has been consistently in the top 5 of the country in all rankings over the last so many years being ignored without giving any reason as to why the committee believes we will not be in top 500 in the next 10 years. Do they know something that we don't know. Was our presentation so poor. Was our proposal so poor. (I was hoping to work for an Institute of Eminence. I am disappointed though I guess I have the option to work for Jio :-)

Combine all this with what all has happened in the last one year, and the optics is really poor. Reopening of the application submission even though 100 universities had already applied. Changing the shortlisting after the committee had decided to shortlist only 40 institutes and asked them to give presentations.

What is certain is that the four members of the committee have not displayed any eminence in signing this report.

Other articles on IoE saga:

UGC's laziness has led to needless 'Institutions of Eminence' controversies by Prof. Pushkar
Imminent Eminence: Ambani's Egg by Prof. Mukul Kesavan
Institutes of Eminence status given without field visits, rankings by Anubhuti Vishnoi
Jio Institute: Why the Modi government is misguided in giving the eminence tag to a select few by Arihant Pawaria
The 'Institutes of Eminence' falls woefully short of what India needs  by Maheshwer Peri
After UGC, Expert committee too disappointed in selecting Institutions of Eminance by Prof. Pushkar

Higher Education Commission of India

The government is proposing to set up a new regulatory authority that will replace UGC through an act of parliament. It will be called Higher Education Commission of India or HECI.

At the outset, this proposed bill appears to be a product of complete confusion in the Ministry and their right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. But after a moment's reflection, it would seem that the right hand indeed knows what the left hand is doing and is not particularly happy about it and may even want to cutoff the left hand.

Before you propose a solution, it is usually a good idea to define a problem and then search for a solution. Of course, sometimes a solution is proposed first and the problem is searched appropriate for that solution. So what is the problem. UGC, of course. You dimwit. You claim to write about higher education, and you don't even know that UGC is the main reason for most of the problems of higher education. I would politely argue that I know UGC is part of the problem, but do you know what aspect of UGC's functioning is the problem.

As per the media reports, the government seems to believe that UGC was not able to function properly because it spent enormous amount of time in deciding grants. If that function is removed from there, they will focus on academic matters, and Indian education system will soon be the best in the world. But wouldn't it be a drain on the time of IAS officers. How will they cope up with this huge extra workload. And if you are going to put extra manpower in MHRD, why not put that extra manpower in UGC. And a voice from the clouds reminded me that I am supposed to be a professor of Computer Science, and hence should have heard of not just cloud computing, but also AI, ML and the government's favorite these days, the blockchain. And somehow the combination of all these technologies will appear in the form of a software, that would disburse the money to all the universities and colleges (I am sure through the Aadhaar verified accounts), and everyone will be happy ever after. In fact, it will improve autonomy since funding decisions will be taken through Artificial Intelligence (real intelligence being in limited supply) and we, of course, all know that AI cannot have any biases and softwares have no way to be tweaked or controlled. But I have a query. If we can develop such a software, why not keep the server in UGC building, why should it be in MHRD building.

Then we hear of he second problem of UGC. It does not have sufficient teeth. By the way, how many teeth does it have? My friends in universities are mortally scared of UGC. It can send completely arbitrary diktats to universities and ask them to comply even when it does not have sufficient teeth. Do you really want to give them more statutory powers. I mean, Indian universities probably are more controlled than in any other country, and you want to increase that control.

And I always believed that the government policy was to give more autonomy. I hear about this Institutes of Eminence scheme, and the graded autonomy scheme and Autonomous colleges and so on. The whole idea seemed to be to slowly increase the autonomy in the higher education sector, but with one master stroke, you are going to undo all of that and put all sorts of controls back on the universities. (Cutting off left hand!)

HECI can not just issue guidelines on anything under the sun, but also demand compliance and take the strongest possible action, including removing the right to grant degrees, if it is not satisfied with the compliance.

It can even ride roughshod over state legislatures. Anytime a legislature approves setting up of a new university, HECI will intervene and say, not so soon. First you need authorization from HECI. That is federalism - Indian style.

Whenever anyone has criticized UGC and wanted its demise, the hope was that if somehow we can just remove lots of UGC diktats, our universities will start improving. But this new act believes in exactly the opposite. You must control much more than now for the universities to improve.

So you have an interesting state of the affairs with Prime Minister's office repeatedly reminding MHRD that we need to give more autonomy to universities, and MHRD repeatedly trying their best to not only continue license permit raj but expand its control.

I am extremely suspicious of anyone who says, "here is the new rule, and this rule applies to everyone except me." If this rule is good for others, why is it not good for you. The proposed law wants to keep Institutes of National Importance outside the regulatory framework of HECI. And most of the central government universities (IITs, NITs, IIITs, even the PPP model IIITs, IISERs, SPAs) fall under the INI nomenclature. Which means that HECI is meant to control primarily state universities (including private ones) and deemed universities. I think a common regulator for all will at least keep the regulator abreast of best practices and there is a hope that the regulator may suggest those best practices to others. There is also hope that if HECI tries giving a stupid diktat to IITs, there will be enough hue and cry that the diktat will be forced to be removed, thereby saving our universities. The framers of the law have figured this out and decided that anyone whom the media is likely to support should be out of regulation. I suggest that they add a line saying that besides INIs, MHRD reserves the right to keep any other university out of HECI's regulatory control. This way any future university who has as many friends in media as IITs can be quietly kept out of regulation.

Then there are drafting issues which make the Act confusing. The members are required to be scholars and more specifically persons of eminence and standing in the field of academics and research, etc. And then it says that Secretary of Higher Education, Secretary of Skill Development and Secretary of DST shall be members. The first two are usually IAS officers and not persons who have a standing in the field of academics and research. And then, one doyen of industry who too is unlikely to be fitting the bill. So, may be they don't need to specify the qualifications of the members.

All members to be appointed by the Government. No role of states. I am not sure how we could bring in non-Government players, but there should be some way. May be the chairman and vice chair can be appointed at the higher level, as in many other commissions, by Minister, leader of opposition, and one more.

There is a confusion about conflict of issues and resulting two year cooling off period for members. Two current professors will be members. If they retire/resign or cease to be professors during their term as a member, then they stop being member of HECI from that day. On the other hand, the moment their term ends, they must cease to be a professor as well for a period of two years. So during membership of the Commission, they can be professors, and that is not conflict of interest, but after their term is over, they cannot be a professor since that will be conflict of interest. I think there should be an exception for professors, since otherwise, you are essentially saying that only those on the verge of retirement can be members. You do need to allow younger blood to be members.

Members are appointed for five years. But suppose a member resigns without completing his/her five year term. The new member appointed will be for a three year term. So, if the previous members stays for 5 years, the next member gets a five year term, but if the previous member stays for 4 years and 364 days, the next member gets a 3 year term. This appears to be a drafting error.

Bottomline: The bill wants an extremely tight control over higher education.

Other articles on HECI:

The Unwanted Makeover of India’s Higher Education by Prof. Nandini Sundar
UGC's planned replacement shows how delusional higher education policy has become by Prof. Anita Rampal

Institutes of Eminence

So, finally, the first chapter of this saga has been written. But we are promised that there are more chapters to be written still. For we wanted to select 20 institutions of eminence and in the first round, only 6 have been selected, leaving 14 slots to be filled in future.

Congratulations to IISc Bangalore, IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi, BITS Pilani, Manipal, and Jio University (yet to be set up, but with Reliance behind it, one hopes it would really be transformational).

I have been a supporter of IoE scheme, but the result is rather disappointing. I supported this for the following reason. I assumed that in the Government sector, most of the institutions selected would be those who already have a huge amount of autonomy, and what they really get is some small change to try and improve further. In fact, in multiple IITs, there were discussions whether it is worth applying for, since the fear was that the autonomy would be less under IoE scheme than what we currently enjoy. To me, the real game changer was the selection of 10 private universities.

I have been a strong votary of giving huge autonomy to every university in the country. But most people remain skeptical of it. I felt that if 10 universities get as much autonomy as was being promised, it would surely lead to all of them becoming much better than what they are already and that would happen in a relatively short period of time, say, 5 years. If academicians, administrators, politicians, all of them see that 10 universities have improved so much in such a short period of time, and the only change is autonomy, they will all think of removing all shackles of other universities, and this will lead to the golden period of India.

But now, with only 3 private universities being given that autonomy, and one of them being a new university (which means that we cannot compare pre-autonomy and post-autonomy period of this university), the impact of this experiment in five years would be so much less. Less number of people will be convinced about giving autonomy to every university based on this experiment, and hence the announcement has been a huge disappointment.

Of course, the minister has said that this is only the first list. So there is hope of more lists. But I guess it would be difficult to do this process again very soon, and then there are elections. So the next list is at least a year away.

If media can be trusted, apparently there is no dearth of good government institutions, but they could only find three private institutions. So, if they can select a 4th private institution, they would immediately announce 4th government one as well.

I am disappointed that Ashoka University is not in the list.

I am also disappointed by some statements in media attributed to the Chairman of the committee, Mr. Gopalaswami. He said, "Where we saw an institute had not improved its accreditation and ranking scores in three cycles, it does not inspire trust that it will be able to meet this goal" [of breaking into top 500 ranks in 10 years].

Accreditation happens in 3 to 5 years, and hardly anyone has gone for three cycles. So I would assume he is talking about ranking and in particular, NIRF, since private sector rankings cannot be trusted. Now, NIRF is still a work in progress. In three years, there have been significant changes in its methodology and in the level of participation. To use such a ranking for denying someone Institute of Eminence status is exactly what a babu is trained to do. Babus cannot do subjective quality evaluation. They need objective numbers to support them. I expected better from this committee. Of course, I understand that this is not the only thing they have looked at. But even pointing this out means that this was definitely an important enough criteria. That this was not the only criteria is proven by the fact that Amritha which has improved rank every year and has had an excellent rank in all three years is not in the list. They were 14th in 2016, 9th in 2017, and 8th in 2018 in the universities ranking.

But overall, a small step forward. Hope this small step leads to bigger steps forward in due course.

Added on 9th July:
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After posting this, the maximum comments (not here, but on other social media sites) have asked if Manipal is better than IIT Kanpur. Well, the straight answer is that in the disciplines IIT Kanpur operates (Engineering and Science, mainly), IITK is better. But there are many disciplines that Manipal has (like Medicine) in which obviously there can be no comparison. If the reports saying that the committee had actually decided on a list of 8 government and 3 private universities, but government took a policy decision to have an equal number of government and private, are true, then I believe that government would do us a great favor if it admits to this. That way all government institutions can claim that they are those 5 unannounced ones. I am convinced IITK would be in that list of 8, and hence even by this metric, not worse than Manipal. Of course, I must add that Manipal has been continually working to improve its teaching and research. They have improved their NIRF rank every year and since the goal was to find private institutions who will be in top 500 in 10 years, they were always a serious contender.

Second most common comment is about Jio University. Should a greenfield university be named as an Institute of Eminence. Well, it is too late to ask. The call for proposals clearly mentioned that greenfield universities are welcome and that they will be evaluated on the basis of plans that they have for the university (and the financial strength and commitment of promoters to carry out those plans). If people did not protest then, they shouldn't protest now. The best comment I received in this regard is from Dr. Bijoy Panigrahi (IIIT Naya Raipur) who suggested that we should have had three categories - government, private and greenfield. I fully agree (and new IITs could be considered in the 3rd category), but it is too late to suggest. I wish this suggestion was given in 2016. So as of now, let us hope that they will start soon, and have great plans and a great team to materialize those plans.