Mumbai University not among India’s top 150 institutes; experts blame politics, lack of research programmes

The University of Mumbai has performed poorly, ranking between 151 and 200, in its debut attempt at Centre’s overall ranking of universities and institutes of management, medicine and engineering.

On Monday, Union Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar released the second edition of India Rankings 2017 of the National Institutional Ranking Framework ( NIRF ), a methodology adopted to rank all institutions of higher education in the country.

The ranking methodology is based on developing a set of metrics for ranking of academic institutions, based on the parameters agreed upon by a core committee set up by the Ministry of Human Resource Development.

The parameters broadly cover “teaching, learning and resources”, “research and professional practices”, “graduation outcomes”, “outreach and inclusivity”, and “perception”.

The Mumbai University failed to feature in the list of top 100 institutions in the NIRF, despite having signed a dozen MoUs with international universities and introducing several new academic programmes in the past one year.

The Indian Institute of Technology — Bombay (IIT-B) bagged the third position overall, whereas the Institute of Chemical Technology (ICT) based in Mumbai ranked fourth in the pharmacy category. Savitribai Phule Pune University was ranked 18th (10th among universities) place and was the only state university to be featured in the top 20.

In a list featuring top colleges in the country, Pune’s Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Information Technology and Biotechnology (30) was the highest ranked college in the state, followed by Pune’s Fergusson College (35), Amravati’s Degree College of Physical Education (36), Mumbai’s St Xavier’s College (40).

A senior official of Mumbai University told Hindustan Times that the reason for the university’s poor ranks could be that they had not filed or published a single patent in 2016. The number of research scholars also has been declining in the past three years, it added.

Registrar MA Khan told DNA , “The Internal Quality Assurance Cell (IQAC) would introspect what can be done to better the rankings next year.”

AD Sawant, former pro vice-chancellor of the university told DNA, “We cannot expect a university to function smoothly when its most prominent appointments are political. The university has not followed several UGC guidelines for research, including open viva and having a plagiarism-detecting software. How can we expect the ranking to be good in such a situation?”

Here’s the list of all the universities which ranked between 1 and 100. For more details click here .

With inputs from agencies