Summary
Calcutta University has slipped to 12th among universities. It had ranked 8th last year and 4th the year before.
Jadavpur University has ranked 4th among universities and St Xavier’s College, Kolkata, 5th among colleges in India in an annual ranking exercise conducted by the Union education ministry.
Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Centenary College, Rahara, has ranked 8th among colleges, according to the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) list that was announced on Monday.
Jadavpur University, which has been battling crippling resource constraints because of a lack of adequate funding from the state and central governments, has retained its rank.
St Xavier’s College, which ranked 8th last year, has improved its position by three notches.
Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Centenary College, too, has improved its position. It had ranked 13th last year.
JU has ranked 10th in the engineering category. Last year, it had ranked 11th.
Calcutta University has slipped to 12th among universities. It had ranked 8th last year and 4th the year before.
JU registrar Snehamanju Basu said the ranking represents the triumph of a public institution.
Suranjan Das, whose 9-year stint as JU vice-chancellor ended on May 31, said the university can further improve its position if it gets adequate government support.
Father Dominic Savio, principal of St Xavier’s College, said in a text message to The Telegraph: “This year, our research publications have increased significantly and we have also extended our outreach activities. This ranking will encourage us to work harder to extend our service to our students and to venture into the new 4-year degree programme for which the preparation is going on for quite some time.”
A comparative study of scores in research and professional practice, one of the parameters for assessing a college, shows St Xavier’s College has improved its performance in the combined metric for publications and quality of publications.
The overall score of the college is 70.80. Last year, it had scored 69.54.
Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur, has ranked 15th this year among colleges. Last year, it had ranked 9th.
IIT Kharagpur has ranked 6th among tech schools. It was 5th last year.
IIEST Shibpur, which has been losing rank under the NIRF over the past few years, has moved up to the 35th position among engineering colleges. Last year, it had ranked 40th.
The Indian Institute of Management Calcutta has ranked 4th in the management category.
In the engineering category, JU’s overall score is 67.04, against 65.68 last year.
Compared with last year’s performance, JU has improved in the three sub-parameters — student strength, including of doctoral students; faculty-student ratio with emphasis on permanent faculty; and the combined metric for faculty with PhD and experience.
The university had ranked 9th in the engineering category in 2017, its best performance since the NIRF came into being.
Former JU VC Das told this newspaper over the phone from London: “The ranking suggests effective teamwork, commitment and leadership can work wonders despite all sorts of constraints. If JU gets more help from the state government and the central government, the university can top the ladder.”
Last October, then VC Das had written to a platform of former students that “government funding — state and central — is becoming extremely inadequate” for JU and appealed to the alumni to raise funds to enable the university to maintain and improve infrastructure and strengthen its ability to compete at the national level.
The RKM college in Rahara has scored 69.53, against 67.56 last year.
Principal Swami Kamalasthananda attributed the improvement in ranking to better performance in the combined metric for publications, among other parameters.
Last updated on 06 Jun 2023
