Page 36 - EW May 2020 for Flipbuilder

Cover Story

EW INDIA HIGHER EDUCATION RANKINGS 2020-21

TOP 300

UNIVERSITIES

Against the backdrop of none of India’s 935 universities
ranked among the Top 200 of the authoritative Times Higher
Education World University Rankings, we present league
tables ranking the country’s best private and government
universities separately

Dilip Thakore

N OTWITHSTANDING incrementally and 409 state government universities. Instead of matur-

futile protests and grumbling of left-
ing into buzzing centres of higher learning, innovation and
research, they have transformed into comfortable watering
leaning academics busily engaged in
holes for well-connected kith and kin of the powerful 20
dispensing obsolete pedagogies and
fixed curriculums in India’s ivory
million-strong neta-babu brotherhood, which under the
tower public universities, there is a
grip over all socio-economic activities, including higher
discernible national mood swing in
favour of privately provided higher cover of egalitarian socialist rhetoric, has acquired an iron
education. Of contemporary India’s 39,931 undergrad col-
education. leges, a mere 747 have been grudgingly conferred academic
Seven decades after enactment of the University Grants autonomy by UGC. And that too after the dawn of the new
Commission (UGC) Act, 1956, which invested wide Big millennium. Meanwhile the syllabuses, curriculums and
Brother powers of control and command over university admission processes of the country’s Central and state uni-
education in the commission, it’s becoming increasingly versities are prescribed by UGC and AICTE.
clear that huge bureaucracies of the UGC and Union hu- In the circumstances, it’s unsurprising that there’s no
man resource development (HRD) ministry which in turn significant entry of Indian universities, some established
have spawned an alphabet soup of higher education regu- almost 200 years ago, in the global Top 200 World Uni-
latory bodies — AICTE (All India Council for Technical versity Rankings (WUR) league tables of the authoritative
Education), NAAC (National Assessment and Accredita- London-based rating agencies Quacquarelli Symonds (QS)
tion Council), NBA (National Board of Accreditation), MCI and Times Higher Education. This year only three Indian
(Medical Council of India) — among others, have ruined universities — IIT-Bombay (#152), IIT-Delhi #182 and the
rather than enabled, post-independence India’s 50 Central Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (IISc, estb.1909) at

36 EDUCATIONWORLD MAY 2020