Against the backdrop of the Union government publishing its slipshod National Institutional Ranking Framework 2018 league tables in early April, we present the EWHE Rankings 2018 rating and ranking the country’s Top 1oo private universities, engineering institutes, multi-disciplinary colleges and B-schools – Dilip Thakore ALTHOUGH ITS ACTS OF OMISSION and commission in early childhood and primary education are causing great damage to the foundations of India’s fragile K-12 education system defined by a few thousand high quality private and Central government schools in an ocean of 1.20 million mediocre to dysfunctional state and local government schools countrywide, following widespread criticism of poor learning outcomes in the country’s 39,000 undergraduate colleges and 800 universities from the media, especially EducationWorld, the BJP/NDA government at the Centre has initiated some overdue reforms in higher education. On December 31 last year, President Ram Nath Kovind gave his assent to a radically re-written Indian Institutes of Management Bill, 2017, which confers substantial autonomy on the country’s 20 Central government-promoted IIMs and empowers them to award degrees instead of postgraduate diplomas as they have been compelled to do for the past half century. “Through this Bill, we will remove all interference of the government, bureaucracy in the functioning of the IIMs. They will themselves decide how to manage and run these premier institutes,” Union human resource development (HRD) minister Prakash Javadekar said while moving the Bill in the Rajya Sabha on December 19. An earlier version of the Bill drafted under the direction of former HRD minister Smriti Irani which severely circumscribed the autonomy of the IIMs, caused an uproar within the academy and was forensically criticised by EducationWorld (see www.educationworld.in archives) and resulted in Irani’s transfer from the HRD to the Union textiles ministry in July 2016. More recently following sustained criticism of the asphyxiating control of the University Grants Commission (UGC, estb.1956) — a Soviet-style institution which closely regulates all non-technical (arts, science, commerce) tertiary education institutions (technical education is equally stringently regulated by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) — Javadekar announced devolution of substantial administrative and curriculum autonomy upon five Central, 21 state, 24 deemed and two private universities awarded high accreditation by NAAC (National Assessment and Accreditation Council). These chosen institutions of higher education now have the freedom to introduce new study programmes, design their own fee structures, establish satellite learning centres, start skill development courses and establish research units. Moreover, they also have the freedom to hire foreign faculty, enroll foreign students, determine faculty remuneration, sign academic collaboration agreements with Indian and foreign institutions and run distance-learning programmes. Such institutional autonomy, normative in all democracies, was hitherto denied to all higher ed institutions — and continues to be denied to the great majority of the country’s colleges and universities. This perhaps explains why none of the country’s 800 universities are ranked in the Top 200 World University Rankings league tables published annually by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and Times Higher Education, the London-based globally respected higher education institutions rating and…
