Six educational institutions to get `Institutions of Eminence’ tag
10 Jul 2018
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The centre on Monday shortlisted six institutions of higher education, including three in the public sector and three in the private sector for according the status of `Institutions of Eminence’.
These include the Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore), Indian Institute of Technology (Bombay) and Indian Institute of Technology (Delhi) from the public sector and Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences (Pilani), Manipal Academy of Higher Education (Manipal) and Reliance Foundation’s still-to-be-launched Jio Institute (Pune) under the green field category
Under the scheme, each ‘public Institution’ selected as ‘Institution of Eminence’ will get financial assistance of up to Rs1, 000 crore over a period of five years.
The landmark decision will help the selected Institutions to become world class educational institutions, union minister for human resources development Prakash Javadekar said while announcing the decision.
The HRD minister said the decision goes beyond graded autonomy to the selected institutions by facilitating them to grow more rapidly. At the same time, they will get more opportunity to scale up their operations with more skills and quality improvement so that they become World Class Institutions in the field of education, the minister added.
The aim is take these institutions to the rank of top 500 institutions globally over the next 10 years and in top 100 of the world ranking eventually. To achieve the top world ranking, these Institutions shall be:
- Provided with greater autonomy to admit foreign students up to 30 per cent of admitted students;
- Recruit foreign faculty up to 25 per cent of faculty strength;
- Offer online courses up to 20 per cent of its programmes;
- To enter into academic collaboration with top 500 in the world ranking Institutions without permission of UGC;
- Give freedom to fix and charge fees from foreign students without restriction;
- Allow flexibility of course structure in terms of number of credit hours and years to take a degree; and
- Complete flexibility in fixing of curriculum and syllabus, among others.
“It is our commitment to empower higher educational institutions to help them become world class teaching and research institutions. An enabling regulatory architecture will be provided to ten public and ten private institutions to emerge as world-class teaching and research institutions. This will enhance affordable access to high quality education for ordinary Indians,” the finance minister had announced in his budget speech 2016.
He also said a detailed scheme will be formulated later.
The government and the UGC had since approved the scheme of providing regulatory architecture for setting up or upgrading of 20 institutions (10 from public sector and 10 from private sector) as world class teaching and research institutions called ‘Institutions of Eminence’. The regulatory architecture has been provided in the form of UGC (Declaration of Government Institutions as Institutions of Eminence) Guidelines, 2017 for public Institutions and UGC (Institutions of Eminence Deemed to be Universities) Regulations, 2017 for private Institutions.
Under this scheme, 114 applications (74 from public sector and 40 from private sector) were received in the ministry for selection of IoEs. The selection of the institutions was done by an Empowered Expert Committee (EEC) comprising N Gopalaswami (chairman), Prof Tarun Khanna, Prof Pritam Singh and Renu Khatore. The committee, in its report presented on 18 May 2018, had recommended selection of only 6 institutions (3 from public sector and 3 from private sector) as Institutions of Eminence.
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