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Expert Comment

Making NIRF more

credible

R. NATARAJAN

N MID-FEBRUARY CHINA’S MINISTRIES OF edu- The purpose of NIRF is to shortlist India’s
cation and science and technology jointly issued a no-
tification to reform the academic evaluation system best higher ed institutions and motivate
Ito reduce “excessive reliance on the Science Citation them to improve. However NIRF will do
and Social Science Citation indices” as key indicators for little to enhance the standing of Indian
“academic promotions, job offers and allocation of research
funding”. This radical initiative is backed by the finance universities in global rankings
ministry, which funds research in national universities.
Moving away from international research publications
was first announced by President Xi Ping during a national classes are not given any importance in them.
education conference in September 2018. Xi observed that The Indian response to the QS and THE WURs is the
“academic standards in higher education institutions should National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) of the
not be led by Western ideas or standards, and stressed that Union human resource development (HRD) ministry. In
China should have its own academic standards and norms, the annual NIRF, the country’s Top 100 universities, arts,
not bound by international norms,” reports the London- science, commerce colleges, engineering colleges and other
based University World News (March 4). professional institutions are evaluated under several pa-
Dr. Futao Huang, professor of higher education at Hi-
roshima University, Japan, who has been studying the rameters including resources, research and stakeholder
perceptions which are assigned differing weightage and
research culture of young academics in China, says that ranked inter se. About 3,500 institutions have voluntarily
the shift of emphasis from international publication will participated in the annual NIRF rankings exercise intro-
translate into huge changes for China’s research evalua- duced in 2015.
tion system. He predicts that the status of several Chinese vidently, the purpose of NIRF is to shortlist India’s best
universities in major global university rankings will decline Ehigher education institutions and rank them in several
as a result of reduction in SCI publications from Chinese categories to motivate them to improve their performance
university researchers. That’s because in recent years Chi- under specified parameters. However, it is clear that NIRF
nese scholars are second worldwide for the number of re- will do little to enhance the standing of Indian universities
search papers published in international journals, behind in global rankings, because the WUR and NIRF appraisal
only the US. frameworks are not aligned. The government mandated
Under the notification, while hard sciences will continue
to be subject to international peer reviews and publication objectives for India’s higher education institutions as set
out in successive National Education Policies (including the
in international journals, in soft sciences, such as the hu- imminent NEP 2020) are vastly different and include GER
manities and social sciences, profound changes can be ex- (gross enrolment ratio), and outreach and inclusivity.
pected inasmuch as they have less international linkages The common criticism of the NIRF initiative is that the
and networks and conduct less international collaborative rank awarded to some institutions is often at wide variance
activities. In addition, as Prof. Huang highlights, English with public perception. But it must be borne in mind that
is not the language for soft sciences as it is for the hard public perception is based on limited awareness of institu-
sciences. tional excellence. The public relations campaigns of institu-
It’s well-known that the major global university rankings tions, the halo effect of vintage universities acquired over
— QS and Times Higher Education — are heavily influenced time, and over-emphasis of popular metrics such as starting
by research output and citations in peer reviewed journals salaries and job-readiness, favoured by parents, students
published in English. This has a direct bearing on university and the media don’t influence NIRF rankings.
rankings, and automatically favours Western and Anglo- With several countries notably China, expressing dissat-
American universities which routinely top the QS and THE isfaction with the WURs of QS, THE and other Western rat-
World University Rankings (WURs) league tables. Higher ing agencies, the introduction of NIRF which is customised
education institutions in non-English speaking countries of for Indian conditions and aligned with national objectives
Europe (excluding the UK), Latin America, etc, suffer low is a welcome development. However, it’s important to en-
rank as a result. sure that its rankings are not too divergent from popular
However, this doesn’t apply to India where higher educa- perceptions. Therefore, it is advisable that the NIRF league
tion is mostly in English. The plain truth is that research is tables are reviewed by a credible third party or committee,
given too little importance in this country’s 993 universi- prior to finalisation.
ties. Instead of addressing this lacuna, the common com-
plaint against established WURs is that social equity issues (Dr. R. Natarajan is former director of IIT-Madras and former chairman of
DIPTA JOSHI such as reservation for the under-privileged and backward All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE))

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