education

Updated: Dec 08, 2018 10:43 IST

A committee of experts headed by former chief election commissioner N Gopalaswami has recommended the coveted ‘Institute of Eminence’ tag for 12 private institutions and as many government ones as part of an ambitious government plan under which they will be nurtured into world class centres of education.

Krea University (Sri City), Shiv Nadar University (Dadri) and Vellore Institute of Technology (Vellore) are among the private institutions chosen by the committee, which also picked Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Madras, Delhi University, Jadavpur University and Banaras Hindu University (BHU) among the publicly funded institutions.

The Narendra Modi government tasked the four-member panel headed by Goplaswami to select 20 ‘institutes of eminence’ as part of the initiative to build world class educational centres.

The panel, on whose recommendation three government and three private institutes had been selected, came up with its second list on Friday and suggested a new category of outstanding sectoral institutions.

As part of the new special list, it zeroed in on the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM)-Ahmedabad and Kolkata, for outstanding sectoral institutions in management studies.

Delhi’s Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and Punjab Agriculture University (PAU), Ludhiana, were selected in the field of agricultural studies.

The Gopalaswami committee suggested that they be given a special tag, say ‘institutions of excellence’ or a similar tag, in recognition of their stellar performance in these sectors, an official in the ministry of human resource development said on condition of anonymity. The panel also named the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Kolkata, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, and the Institute of Chemical Technology (ICT), Mumbai, and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, as outstanding sectoral institutions in this new list.

“It was on the basis of this committee’s recommendations that three public and three private institutions were chosen for the institute of eminence tag earlier. Today, the panel has given a list of an additional 12 names for public and an equal number in the private category to be selected as institutes of eminence,” the official cited above said on the condition of anonymity.

IIT-Madras, IIT-Kharagpur, Delhi University, Jadavpur University, Anna University, BHU, Tezpur University, Aligarh Muslim University, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Punjab University, Andhra University and the University of Hyderabad were the 12 picked for the ‘Institution of Eminence’ tag in the public sector. Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru; and the IITs in Mumbai and Delhi had earlier been selected for the tag.

Among private institutions, the remaining nine the panel chose were Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Bengaluru; Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi; Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, Bhubaneswar; Azim Premji University, Bengaluru ; the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru; Indian Institute of Public Health, Gandhinagar; Ashoka University, Sonipat; OP Jindal University, Sonipat; and the Satya Bharati University in Haryana.

“In the report submitted today, the panel has explained the reasons for choosing the institutions. It has looked at their managements, kind of research undertaken and also the financial resources while making its recommendations. For Greenfield projects, availability of land was a key aspect,” a second official said.

The panel, apart from Gopalaswami, included management guru Pritam Singh, Renu Khator of the University of Houston and Tarun Khanna of Harvard University.

The report of the panel is expected to come up for discussion at a meeting at the University Grants Commission (UGC) on Monday. The UGC will then forward the report to the government.