As a 1.2 billion people strong nation's premier institute, if you can only make it too the list and get nowhere near the top is more of a testimony of how pathetic the nation is.....IISc and Indian STEM institutions need great leadership...And I havent seen this kind of leadership at all. While these systems cant even make use of great Indians like Venkatesh "Venky" Narayanamurti etc. who have been Deans, VCs etc. at places like Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, UIUC, Michigan etc.
It doesnt matter where we are, but how fast we are moving forward and it sickens me to see how slowly the IISc or IITs or other STEM institutions move....even slower than their foreign counterparts...utterly disgusting...
it is time for iisc/iits to stop worrying about rankings and start doing good quality and honest research. i also agree with the anonymous post above.
i hope 15-20 years down the line india will be a major scientific powerhouse making a significant contribution to the world scientific output, and research will be conducted at a much larger scale in terms of both quantitiy and quality in india
i also believe that for india to make a better impact in science, research has to move out of the iisc/iits and the other few government institutions where it is currently trapped in and india has to have a MUCH, MUCH larger workforce employed in research and product development.
Before others get carried away by the bashing blanket and/or bleak speculations, one should not ignore giving some credit to our educational institutes as per the same report that says: “Separate lists for the top 100 universities in specialised fields were also released. IISc secured a rank of 76-100 in the top 100 engineering and technology universities, and a rank of 49 in Chemistry.”
My personal view: For too long Indian institutions have been following the idea that their size, scale and scope should be driven solely by the needs of the country, in particular, by the educational needs of the population. While educational institutions have social obligations based on the society in which they are set, their true "dharma" I think is to evolve themselves based on the state of knowledge in the world. In fact social needs should be seen mainly as a means to achieve knowledge goals and not as ends in themselves.
Today the expansion in Indian education is happening only because of the demographics. Whereas it should have been happening much earlier, simply because there is so much knowledge out there that our institutions need to absorb. Only when institutional growth is guided by the rate at which knowledge is produced, and not by the immediate needs of the country, can true excellence can be achieved. Until then our institutions will remain stunted in development.
It is not that this idea is foreign to us: Nalanda university was huge, much larger than IIXs, at time when the population was a tiny fraction of what it is today, and it had all kinds of disciplines included in it. Yet somewhere we have stopped thinking in those terms in modern India.
Hello Giri Sir,, I have completed my Btech in ECE and planning to go for MTech next year. Sir i would like to ask you if it is possible to switch over to CSE for MTech. The point is that i am more interested in the CSE subjects and want to do my PG in it. So is it possible to switch over?? Waiting for your reply...
Guys, While these rankings do highlight the scope of improvement, let us also remember that most rankings use parameters that are unfair towards Indian Universities.
1) IIT/ IISc do not have large social sciences program except small support departments. When they rank you as a comprehensive University, all these factors come into account. ACWU ranking considers the social sciences citation index as one of the metrics. 2) Many Rankings such as those by US News have criterion for number of foreign faculty/students etc. on which we lose out. 3) IITs/IISc do not have a medical school/clinical research. 4) Size of IITs and IISc is much smaller that major research Universities. To put things into perspective, the number of faculty in ECE in Georgia Tech exceeds 150. Same is true of many asian powerhouses. The rankings do not consider institutional size.
While it remains true that we need to bootstrap ourselves, things have been changing for the better.
I would have to agree with Himanshu here, Indian Universities are just not cut out perform well in those rankings. I am not saying that papers published and patents awarded are bad metrics. But my concern is that ranking systems seek out multidisciplinary institutes. While in India most of the institutes are anything but. Not all of the major IITs/IISc have a very highly regarded Management program, while IIMs are just for management. And medical is not siding with anything else. We have some very competent Engineering, science, management and medical institutes, nobody can deny that, but what we lack are unified universities. A university for the ranking systems employed have to have every freaking department that can exist. It's not how it works here and we take a big hit for that.
have to agree with ankur here. forget about keeping pace with the current international expanding knowledge base, india cannot even keep pace with the educational needs of her population.
iit/iisc maybe graduating around 5000 students every year out of which maybe 500 are phd every year. iit/iisc may have around 1000 profs engaged in research.
forget about making significant impact in science/engineering/math, can iits/iisc make india a strong scientific nation with such abysmally low numbers in a country of 1.2 billion?
BTW the rankings are called ARWU....anyone who is remotely in academia at UG, PG or professional level know these rankings.....cant believe Deccan Herald got it wrong and Giri didnt even realize that. Please dont tell me this is the first time you are hearing of these rankings.
In iisc, we don't care about rankings. we care about h-index, usually known as hech-yeendex, on campus.
h (or hech) signifies your height, or, how tall you stand in the community of people who refer back to you...kinda like a banyan tree with shoots.
had never heard of it, till i joined this obnoxious island of mosquitoes and stray dogs in the middle of the traffic jam capital of the world, named after boiled beans.
14 comments:
Not really something to be proud of.
As a 1.2 billion people strong nation's premier institute, if you can only make it too the list and get nowhere near the top is more of a testimony of how pathetic the nation is.....IISc and Indian STEM institutions need great leadership...And I havent seen this kind of leadership at all. While these systems cant even make use of great Indians like Venkatesh "Venky" Narayanamurti etc. who have been Deans, VCs etc. at places like Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, UIUC, Michigan etc.
It doesnt matter where we are, but how fast we are moving forward and it sickens me to see how slowly the IISc or IITs or other STEM institutions move....even slower than their foreign counterparts...utterly disgusting...
it is time for iisc/iits to stop worrying about rankings and start doing good quality and honest research. i also agree with the anonymous post above.
i hope 15-20 years down the line india will be a major scientific powerhouse making a significant contribution to the world scientific output, and research will be conducted at a much larger scale in terms of both quantitiy and quality in india
i also believe that for india to make a better impact in science, research has to move out of the iisc/iits and the other few government institutions where it is currently trapped in and india has to have a MUCH, MUCH larger workforce employed in research and product development.
Before others get carried away by the bashing blanket and/or bleak speculations, one should not ignore giving some credit to our educational institutes as per the same report that says: “Separate lists for the top 100 universities in specialised fields were also released. IISc secured a rank of 76-100 in the top 100 engineering and technology universities, and a rank of 49 in Chemistry.”
My personal view: For too long Indian institutions have been following the idea that their size, scale and scope should be driven solely by the needs of the country, in particular, by the educational needs of the population. While educational institutions have social obligations based on the society in which they are set, their true "dharma" I think is to evolve themselves based on the state of knowledge in the world. In fact social needs should be seen mainly as a means to achieve knowledge goals and not as ends in themselves.
Today the expansion in Indian education is happening only because of the demographics. Whereas it should have been happening much earlier, simply because there is so much knowledge out there that our institutions need to absorb. Only when institutional growth is guided by the rate at which knowledge is produced, and not by the immediate needs of the country, can true excellence can be achieved. Until then our institutions will remain stunted in development.
It is not that this idea is foreign to us: Nalanda university was huge, much larger than IIXs, at time when the population was a tiny fraction of what it is today, and it had all kinds of disciplines included in it. Yet somewhere we have stopped thinking in those terms in modern India.
Hello Giri Sir,, I have completed my Btech in ECE and planning to go for MTech next year. Sir i would like to ask you if it is possible to switch over to CSE for MTech. The point is that i am more interested in the CSE subjects and want to do my PG in it. So is it possible to switch over?? Waiting for your reply...
@ shri ankur kulkarni,
very well said.
Guys,
While these rankings do highlight the scope of improvement, let us also remember that most rankings use parameters that are unfair towards Indian Universities.
1) IIT/ IISc do not have large social sciences program except small support departments. When they rank you as a comprehensive University, all these factors come into account. ACWU ranking considers the social sciences citation index as one of the metrics.
2) Many Rankings such as those by US News have criterion for number of foreign faculty/students etc. on which we lose out.
3) IITs/IISc do not have a medical school/clinical research.
4) Size of IITs and IISc is much smaller that major research Universities. To put things into perspective, the number of faculty in ECE in Georgia Tech exceeds 150. Same is true of many asian powerhouses. The rankings do not consider institutional size.
While it remains true that we need to bootstrap ourselves, things have been changing for the better.
I would have to agree with Himanshu here, Indian Universities are just not cut out perform well in those rankings. I am not saying that papers published and patents awarded are bad metrics. But my concern is that ranking systems seek out multidisciplinary institutes. While in India most of the institutes are anything but. Not all of the major IITs/IISc have a very highly regarded Management program, while IIMs are just for management. And medical is not siding with anything else. We have some very competent Engineering, science, management and medical institutes, nobody can deny that, but what we lack are unified universities. A university for the ranking systems employed have to have every freaking department that can exist. It's not how it works here and we take a big hit for that.
have to agree with ankur here. forget about keeping pace with the current international expanding knowledge base, india cannot even keep pace with the educational needs of her population.
iit/iisc maybe graduating around 5000 students every year out of which maybe 500 are phd every year. iit/iisc may have around 1000 profs engaged in research.
forget about making significant impact in science/engineering/math, can iits/iisc make india a strong scientific nation with such abysmally low numbers in a country of 1.2 billion?
i think not
BTW the rankings are called ARWU....anyone who is remotely in academia at UG, PG or professional level know these rankings.....cant believe Deccan Herald got it wrong and Giri didnt even realize that. Please dont tell me this is the first time you are hearing of these rankings.
The rankings are also called as ACWU. Look at
http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/rankings/2011/110818CordovaShanghai.html
But ARWU is standard.
Sorry, it should have indeed read as ARWU.
In iisc, we don't care about rankings. we care about h-index, usually known as hech-yeendex, on campus.
h (or hech) signifies your height, or, how tall you stand in the community of people who refer back to you...kinda like a banyan tree with shoots.
had never heard of it, till i joined this obnoxious island of mosquitoes and stray dogs in the middle of the traffic jam capital of the world, named after boiled beans.
@anon at August 26, 2011 11:17 PM
You make it sound like it is a bad thing. I don't think it is.
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