In budget 2016, The Finance Minister had announced that “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. A detailed scheme will be formulated."

In context of this, an Empowered Expert Committee (EEC) chaired by N.Gopalaswami recommended selection of 6 institutions (3 from public sector and 3 from private sector) as Institutions of Eminence.

• Public Sector: Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Karnataka; Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, Maharashtra; and Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.
• Private Sector: Jio Institute (Reliance Foundation), Pune under Green Field Category; Birla Institute of Technology & Sciences, Pilani, Rajasthan; and Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, Karnataka.

Features of such institutions include

• The UGC (Institutions of Eminence Deemed to be Universities) regulations, 2017 will govern all such institutions that are conferred with this status, ensuring their complete academic, administrative and financial autonomy.
• These regulations will override all other UGC regulations and free the institutions of UGC’s restrictive inspection regime, the regulatory control over fee and curriculum.
• It should preferably be multidisciplinary and have both teaching and research focus of an exceptionally high quality.
• Apart from the regular courses, it should also offer various interdisciplinary courses, including in areas of emerging technology and interest as well as those of relevance to the development concerns of countries like India.
• There should be a reasonably good mix of domestic and foreign students.
• There should be a transparent merit-based selection in admissions, so that the focus remains on getting meritorious students.
• The faculty student ratio should not be less than 1:10 after three years of declaration as a World Class Institution.
• The Institution should have a world-class library with subscriptions to reputed journals in the areas of its course offerings.
• It should have student amenities comparable with that of globally reputed institutions.
• The Institution should have reasonably large owned campus with adequate space for expansion etc.

Benefits of declaration as IoE

• Each public Institution selected as ‘Institution of Eminence’ will get financial assistance up to Rs. 1000 Crore over the period of five years under this scheme.
• These Institutions shall be provided with greater autonomy to admit foreign students up to 30% of admitted students; to recruit foreign faculty upto 25% of faculty strength; to offer online courses upto 20% of its programmes; to enter into academic collaboration with top 500 in the world ranking Institutions without permission of UGC; free to fix and charge fees from foreign students without restriction; flexibility of course structure in terms of number of credit hours and years to take a degree; complete flexibility in fixing of curriculum and syllabus, among others.
• 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
• It is expected that the above selected Institutions will come up in top 500 of the world ranking in 10 years and in top 100 of the world ranking eventually overtime.

Issues Involved

• On Institutes
  •  Non-applicability of reservation system would face resentment from particular section of society.
  •  In the absence of supervisory support from UGC, in the long run these institutes could fall under political influence and might lose its quality of research.
  •  Socio-Economic incentives for the researcher should be provided in order to avoid brain-drain.
• On ranking methodology
  •  A heavy emphasis is placed on subjective perception-based metrics estimated using independently conducted surveys.
  •  The participation of India in general and academicians/researchers in international ranking surveys have historically been very low – thereby pulling down India’s average performance.
  •  Complex classification of Institutions of National Importance, Central, State, State Private, and Deemed to Be Universities and overregulation by various bodies such as UGC, AICTE, NBA, NAAC father hampers the ranking prospect for India Universities.

Other opinions

• High competition: The entry into the global education race could now become an overriding concern. To gauge institutions principally by their prospective rankings, without regard for the relevance of outcomes, would be reductionist.
• Transparency: There is lack of transparency in the selection process as Reliance Foundation’s greenfield Jio Institute has been chosen but KREA University, led by former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan and with considerable business and academic eminence on board, has been left out. Public sharing of benchmarks and guidelines may prevent such controversies in the future.
• Framework: The knowledge economy does not consist of multi-disciplinary universities alone, but in current scenario universities seem to be the only one eligible for the IoE tag. Both in the interest of parity and for fear of losing opportunity, a separate category could be created to accommodate sectoral institutions, like the Indian Institutes of Management.