In what appears to be a deep disappointment IIT-Madras has written to the Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar expressing their concerns for not selecting the Institute for the Eminence tag although, the name of the Institute was recommended by the UGC-mandated selection panel.
Pawan Goenka, Industrialist and IIT-Madras chairman, has expressed the concerns of the Board of Governors (BoG) of the institute to the Javadekar in a letter almost after a month of announcements of IoE names.
The Empowered Expert Committee (EEC) was entrusted with the task of finding 20 IoEs out of 114 applicants. The committee has recommended the names of the 11 institutes for the same. The Indian Institute of Science (IISc), IIT-Madras, IIT-Kharagpur, IIT-Bombay, IIT-Delhi, Delhi University, Jadavpur University and Anna University were recommended under the public category, in that order. BITS-Pilani, Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) and Reliance Foundation’s proposed Jio Institute were suggested under the private category.
The UGC on the other hand forwarded only six names to the government on July 9 -- three public and three private. According to the UGC IISc, IIT-Bombay and IIT-Delhi were chosen based on their performance in the QS World University Rankings 2018.
Criticizing the Commission’s decision of ignoring the IIT-Madras, Goenka wrote to Javadekar “BoG was surprised that the Commission used rankings by a commercial agency to select only three public institutions from the EEC list. The selection, he is learned to have written, was neither based on the findings of the EEC nor the government’s own National Institute Ranking Framework (NIRF).”
In the NIRF rankings, IIT-Madras has been assessed as best engineering institute of the nation from past three consecutive years.
There were rumors of public institutions not being happy about the selection procedure, especially whose names were not forwarded by the UGC, IIT-Madras is the first to pen down its disappointment in the government’s decision.