Since it admitted its first batch of 100 students a decade ago, the O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat (Haryana) has established itself as one of India’s most promising humanities and liberal arts universities. In the QS BRICS University Rankings 2019, JGU is ranked among the Top 3 percent and among the Top 450 in the QS Asia league table – Dilip Thakore There’s a palpable sentiment of euphoria and great expectations on the 80-acre campus of the O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat (Haryana) in Delhi NCR (JGU, estb. 2009). Since it admitted its first batch of 100 students into its law school a decade ago, JGU has quickly established itself as one of India’s most promising, high-potential law, humanities and liberal arts universities. Within the short span of a decade, the number of schools under the umbrella of this American Ivy League-style wholly residential privately promoted university has increased to eight, which together host 4,300 students mentored by 432 faculty. The pervasive euphoria on the sprawling JGU campus dominated by its four-storeyed academic block with a built-up area of 300,000 sq. ft. designed by celebrated French architect Stephane Paumier and distinguished by massive criss-crossed steel cantilevers — a tribute to philanthropist-industrialist Naveen Jindal, chairman of the Delhi-based Jindal Steel & Power Ltd (estb. 1952), the country’s third largest steel manufacturing company (annual revenue: Rs.28,444 crore) and JGU’s founder-chancellor — is the outcome of the excellent notices and encomiums this fledgling university has received in its tenth anniversary year. In the latest 2019 World University Rankings (WUR) league tables of the authoritative London-based Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), JGU is ranked among the Top 3 percent of 9,000 BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) higher education institutions and the youngest Indian university in the Top 300. In the QS Asia league table of 13,000 universities assessed, JGU is ranked among the Top 450. Back home, although the newly-promoted JGU does not figure in the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) 2018 league table of India’s Top 100 universities dominated by science and technology universities, it was awarded the swachhata (‘cleanliness’) award of the Union ministry of human resource development for maintaining the country’s cleanest-greenest campus in 2017 and ranked #2 this year. Moreover in the EducationWorld India Higher Education Rankings 2018-19, JGU is ranked #22 among the country’s Top 100 private universities, and #8 under the parameter of internationalism (EW May 2018). More significantly in a survey conducted by the Economic Times — India’s #1 business daily — JGU was adjudged India’s most international university on the basis of the largest number of foreign faculty employed (ET November 4, 2018). Indeed the cup of this new greenfield preteens university is brimmeth over. On December 7, the Union HRD ministry shortlisted JGU for inclusion in its second list of ten Institutions of Eminence which will be awarded full academic autonomy, i.e, freeing it from following the standardised lowest common denominator syllabuses prescribed by the University Grants Commission or its proposed successor, the Higher…
