How Rail Development Authority will change the Indian Railways landscape

Rail Development Authority will help the Indian Railways take decisions on pricing of services, consumer interests, generating revenue and competition, among others

The Cabinet on Wednesday evening flagged off a major reform in Indian Railways, by allowing the formation of an independent railway regulator called Rail Development Authority (RDA), with an initial corpus of Rs50 crore.

The regulatory authority will change the landscape of Indian Railways as it will help the national carrier take decisions on pricing of services commensurate with costs, protect consumer interests, suggest measures for enhancement of non-fare revenue, promote competition and encourage market development, create positive environment for investment, promote efficient resource allocation and benchmarking of service standards, and suggest measures for absorption of new technologies and human resource development.

Until now, reforms in Indian Railways like increase in train tariffs and reduction in the number of railway employees have been withheld due to political reasons.

The need for a rail regulator has been emphasized since 2001 by various committees. The first recommendation for an independent rail regulator came in 2001 when an expert group under the chairmanship of Rakesh Mohan suggested the formation of a regulatory authority to fix rail tariffs. Later, several railway committees suggested a Railway Tariff Development Authority. The most recent recommendation for RDA came through the National Transport Development Policy Committee (NTDPC) in 2014 and Bibek Debroy’s Committee in 2015.

In Railway Budget 2015-16, minister for railways Suresh Prabhu had announced that for the purpose of orderly development of infrastructure enabling competition and protection of customer interest, it is important to have a regulation mechanism independent of the service provider. Further, it was proposed to set up a mechanism for making regulations, setting performance standards and determining tariff.

Functions of RDA

The railway regulator will work within the parameters of the Railway Act, 1989. Here is what it will do:

• Tariff determination: The regulator will frame principles, recommend tariffs, principles for classification of commodities, frame principles for social service obligation and guidelines for track access charges on dedicated freight corridors.

• Ensuring fair play: The Railway Board has been often accused of bias. The regulatory body will ensure level-playing field for all stakeholders. It will help propose modifications and send suggestions or advisory notes on investment in railways by the Indian Railways, make suggestions regarding policies for private investment to ensure reasonable safeguards to PPP investors and to resolve disputes regarding future concession agreements.

• Setting standards: It will help set efficiency and performance standards, and disseminate information in line with global best practices and benchmarking.

Constitution of RDA

The RDA will have a chairman and three members with a fixed term of five years each. They can be removed by the Central government only on certain grounds, including insolvency, conviction, misbehaviour, physical and mental incapability.

The organisation will be set up with an initial corpus of Rs50 crore and can engage experts from relevant areas for assistance.

It will be an independent body with a separate budget. The independence is ensured through provision of a separate budget, and the appointment and removal process.

The Central government will appoint the chairman and members by choosing from a panel of names recommended by the search and selection committee consisting of cabinet secretary as chairman, chairman railway board, secretary of department of personnel and training and chairman of any regulatory body of the Central government nominated by the cabinet secretary.

GDP is a flawed but magical indicator

All the back and forth about how GDP is calculated is only possible because despite all the flaws, the measure somehow ends up feeling right

Economists have long argued that the gross domestic product has many flaws as a measure of well-being and policy success. Yet there’s a good reason it’s still being used: There’s a certain magic to it, despite its science being somewhat iffy.

On Monday, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a paper by Harvard economist Martin Feldstein detailing an argument he has been making for years—that GDP calculations underestimate actual growth and productivity. This optimistic argument is based on the difficulty of measuring changes in the quality of products and services, and therefore of life. Feldstein points out, for example, that official measurements, for the most part, only catch quality improvements if a product or service requires more expensive inputs: “If it doesn’t cost more to produce a product or service this year than it did last year, there has been no improvement.”

That way, for example, leaps in the quality of healthcare—when a patient who used to need a week in hospital to recover from a cataract operation is now discharged on the day of the procedure—are not measured. The way official statistics measure the introduction of new products, too, doesn’t account for their actual contribution to consumers’ well-being or to the economy as a whole.

According to Feldstein, government messaging should be more optimistic to make sure people understand that their savings will buy more in the future. Goods and services are improving lives more than price increases would indicate.

Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz has long held the opposite view—that the GDP as measured today may overestimate well-being. For example, it counts any increase in government spending as positive, even though these increases may be inefficient or even counterproductive.

And as for those improvements in healthcare quality that form the basis of Feldstein’s argument, they, too, can be overestimated in the US because healthcare spending there is higher than other countries while the outcomes are the same or worse.

Some recent work also argues against the theory, supported by Feldstein, that the recent productivity slowdown is due to a failure of measurement. Last year, Chad Syverson of the University of Chicago pointed out that even the most generous estimates of the value added by the growth in digital technology aren’t big enough to bring productivity growth to its pre-2004 trajectory.

Another analysis by International Monetary Fund (IMF) economist Marshall Reinsdorf found that their unmeasured effect on productivity could only be small. Statistics fail to record some of the added value because of the tech sector’s use of tax havens, he wrote. But even the “free” Internet services provided now are counted through the advertising they attract. And some of the improvements that tech created for consumers don’t belong in the GDP calculation in the first place: If they save a user some personal time, that stays in the home and doesn’t affect economic activity (even if it did, it might be cancelled out by the time our digital addictions take out of our productive workday).

All the back and forth about how GDP is calculated is only possible because despite all the flaws, the measure somehow ends up feeling right. The distortions often end up cancelling themselves out.

In 2013, Nicholas Oulton of the London School of Economics’ Center for Economic Performance wrote a paper to disprove the notion that the UK’s economic growth had been overestimated because official calculations overstated the contribution of banking to GDP. He showed that “if banking output has been overstated, then the output of some other industry or industries must have been understated”.

Earlier this year, a team of IMF economists attempted to figure out how GDP numbers would have changed for a number of developed countries had they used an outdated deflation method, still used by China and India. It turned out that the effects wouldn’t have been consistently negative or positive for most countries; for Western European countries, on aggregate, the effects would have been small.

The team’s recommendation was that more countries adopt the more progressive deflation methods now used by most of the G20—but their research made it clear that in some cases the difference in the results would be tiny.

As much as GDP calculation isn’t an exact science, the results usually make sense. That’s why per capita GDP is one of the strongest predictors of happiness measured through people’s subjective perceptions of their well-being.

It’s fine to argue for better measures of well-being. These measures, however, add even harder-to-measure indicators, such as levels of social support, freedom and generosity. For many countries, these data are either unavailable or subjectively coloured.

The choice is between engineering and science: The former will accept an imperfect approximation, while the latter will always strive for perfection.

As Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen recently pointed out, GDP is “a pretty noisy indicator” at best. Yet it remains extremely useful as a reference

Naxalbari: India’s greatest war with itself

Several thousand have followed in India’s greatest war with itself: innocents, rebels, and those tasked to combat them. They die every other day, statistics over solutions

About Naxalbari, and the spark that set a subcontinent on fire.

Some fire: it still burns 50 years later, even as India seeks to sit on the high table of global affairs, as an overwhelming vote at home for inclusive progress turns out to have been interpreted by the victors as a mandate for exclusive persuasion.

It began as a farmers’ protest from a cluster of three villages near Naxalbari in the Dooars region of northern Bengal, west of the regional airport at Bagdogra. In one district, Darjeeling, of one state, West Bengal.

After five decades of undeniable socio-economic development, avatars of the rebellion—or “Naxalite” movement—that spread after leftwing radicals co-opted that farmers’ protest, continues to mark the failures of India as a nation. Last year, the ministry of home affairs (which tellingly has a Left Wing Extremism Division) recorded leftwing rebellion of various degrees of intensity in 106 districts across nine states. Seven years earlier, that count was nearly a third of India’s 600-plus districts, across 14 states.

The fount remains Naxalbari.

“Do you remember what happened that day?” I asked Punjab Rao when I visited him some years ago.

Rao knew what I meant, this former Indian Army soldier from the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra who settled down in these parts after being decommissioned, and became a farmer-revolutionary.

“Twenty-fourth of May, 1967. Just up the lane from this house,” he pointed behind him, ageing eyes alight, voice sharp. “Landless peasants had had enough.”

His rundown hut was a few yards off the road near Naxalbari, one that travels northwest to Nepal’s eastern borders; another sliver travels southwest towards Bihar, linking northern Bengal through forest, farmland and the region’s mainstay, tea gardens. A patchwork of farms are still worked by poor, mostly tenant farmers. The Naxalbari of revolutionary grammar was really a cluster of villages and hamlets with quirky names from nature and history: Hatighisa, after elephants; Phansidewa, literally, hanged; the railway hub of New Jalpaiguri—the place of olives.

Anger had been brewing over scarcity of food, issues of landlessness, share-cropping and bonded labour for about a year up to May 1967, Rao recalled. “There was talk of revolution, but they just wanted to assert their rights. They had taken over land. Then the police came, called by the jotedar.”

“As soon as we heard about it, we set off with whatever we had—swords, bows and arrows, spears, farming implements. The people with us, as soon as they saw the group of police and landlords, they let the arrows fly. One hit the landlord, another hit someone on the leg. The police ran away. That was the beginning.”

The police returned in large numbers the next day, and destroyed houses, broke what they could, mixed rice and lentils with dirt, destroyed all other food. By then the spark had spread to Bengaijote, just beyond Naxalbari. Eleven protestors died by police firing that day.

“Naxalbari had its first martyrs,” said Rao. “And the Naxalbari movement was born. Bas.”

There is a memorial to the eleven in Bengaijote, by the Tukruria forest, a once-dense tract that proved to be a good hiding place for rebels—from the nearby villages as well as Kolkata and elsewhere. Unlike their rural comrades who fought for their lands and livelihoods, the urban guerrillas were driven by idealism layered with the rhetoric of Mao Zedong. Or those of Charu Mazumdar, a parent of the extreme movement that broke ranks with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) to formally establish the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)—the “Naxalite” party.

The hamlet of Bengaijote is mostly a scattering of huts, a handful of brick houses, and inhabitants a mix: some impoverished Rajbongshi tribals, indigenous to this area, some Santhal tribals, brought in generations earlier as labour for tea gardens. You may hear Nepali pop music.

In a small clearing is a makeshift flagstaff with a small red flag, and four pedestals painted blood red with busts on each. Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Mazumdar. To the right of the Naxalbari pantheon is a memorial to the 11 killed on “Historic 25th May 1967”. All unarmed protestors, women and men: Dhaneshwari Devi, Seemaswari Mallick, Nayaneswari Mallick, Surubala Burman, Sonamati Singh, Phoolmati Devi, Samsari Saibani, Gaudrau Saibani, Kharsingh Mallick. “And two children”.

Several thousand have followed in India’s greatest war with itself: innocents, rebels, and those tasked to combat them. They die every other day, statistics over solutions.

Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar Releases ‘India Rankings 2017’

Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar Releases ‘India Rankings 2017’

India’s 2nd Ever Rankings Of Indian Institutions

Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore Bags First Position in Overall Rankings

The Union Minister of Human Resource Development, Shri Prakash Javadekar , released the India Rankings 2017 for the Educational Institutions and dedicated it  to the nation in New Delhi today. Speaking on the  occasion  he said that this step is a sequel of our  Government’s commitment towards bringing landmark changes in the quality of education provided to students across the country for which we are working relentlessly. Shri Javadekar said this ranking is meant to have beginning of a fair competition among the institutions for achieving excellence in their efforts. This has recorded success beyond any doubt and is bound to march ahead.

The Minister said so far no one has raised fingers on the ranking charted out by the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), working under his Ministry. And  this has proved  its worth on the stipulated Parameters. He said until now NAAC and NBA used to assess Educational Institutions but now in our government this is the unique modification for bringing transparency and credibility. He said besides institutions now parents and students will also have worth information’s about the ranking and quality of a particular university, college or  vocational institution. This has led to the global scaling up of our credentials.

The Minister on this occasion also announced that government will extend more help to quality education institutions. It’s a vital change of policy and will motivate all the institutions to perform and excel. Factors regarding number of research papers submitted, patents obtained and campus placement figures will also count for seeking government support. He said importance to public perception, employer perception and academic perception will also be accorded.

Dr. Mahendra Nath Pandey Minister of State (HRD)  in his address said this exercise has evoked a sense of transparency and accountability and the sole purpose is to march ahead for quality education. 

Secretary Higher,  Education Shri K.K.  Sharma elaborating  ‘INDIA RANKINGS 2017’ said that  in this second edition of India Rankings, a total of 2995 institutions have participated this time. This includes 232 Universities, 1024 Engineering Institutions, 546 Management Institutions, 318 Pharmacy Institutions and 637 General Degree Colleges, and others. Many of these have participated in multiple disciplines, adding to a total of 3319 participants across disciplines.

“India Rankings 2017” have ranked institutions in the disciplines/categories mentioned above, and have also provided a common overall rank across all disciplines for those institutes which either have more than 1000 enrolled students, or which are centrally funded.

The parameters used for India Rankings 2017 are broadly similar to those used last year. However, at the level of detail, some of the sub-parameters have been tweaked for a more robust system of rankings. In particular for evaluating Research Impact, parameters for quality of publications have been enhanced to include the number of highly cited papers, in addition to the usual parameters of publications per faculty and citations per paper. Innovations have also been made in improving the scoring metrics, where the “percentile” metric has been replaced by a more discriminating metric. All research related information, including publications, citations, highly cited papers and even patent information about institutes was collected from third party databases (from our industry partners) to obtain an objective and unbiased picture. For this year’s Perception inputs, a large data base of academic and industry peers and employers was deployed, in addition to getting inputs from members of general public. Finally, some provision has also been made for the scale of operations of an institute in terms of the size of its student population and graduated doctoral students, he added. 

Shri Sharma said that the data received from both institutional and third party sources were subject to extensive scrutiny for consistency and correctness by a team of experts. As per the declared time-schedule, the rankings are being announced on the first Monday of April. The Rankings List includes 100 institutions each in the Overall, University, Engineering and General College Categories, and 50 each in Management and Pharmacy Disciplines. Additional rankings in suitably bunched forms are also being provided.

Although the Central Government funded institutions, in general continue to do well, some of the state-funded universities also are prominent. Some private institutions and universities have also been quietly climbing up to take high positions, thus offering value for money to their students, going by their ranks. Some of these institutions have consistently maintained or improved their positions of last year, clearly indicating that it was not a one-time fluke event. This is clearly a satisfying development in Higher Education.

Finally, a very exciting feature of this year’s Rankings is the ranking of General Degree Colleges in Arts and Sciences from across the country. While many of the names appearing in the top-100 list are well known and famous, there are many others who may not be so well known but have fared well. Clearly these need to be watched out for in future. There are also a few notable absentees here as also in other categories, due to their non-participation. We hope that there will be more enthusiastic participation in the years to come, he added. 

List of top 10 India Rankings 2017 is as follows:

Overall:

1. Indian Institute of Science, Banglore, Karnataka
2. Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (Chennai), Tamil Nadu
3. Indian Institute of Technology,  Bombay (Mumbai), Maharashtra
4. Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, West Bengal
5. Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, Delhi
6. Jawahar Lal Nehru University, New Delhi, Delhi
7. Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh
8. Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, Assam
9. Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, Uttarakhand
10. Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh

Engineering

1.      Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, Tamil Nadu

2.      Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (Mumbai), Maharashtra

3.      Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, West Bengal

4.      Indian Institute of Tchnology, New Delhi, Delhi

5.      Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh

6.      Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, Uttarakhand

7.      Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, Assam

8.      Anna University, Chennai, Tamil Nadu

9.      Jadavpur University, Kolkata, West Bengal

10.  Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, Telangana

Management

1.Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, Gujarat

2. Indian Institute of Management, Banglore, Karnataka

3.Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, West Bengal

4. Indian Instituut of Management, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh

5.Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode, Kerala

6. Indian Institute of Technology,New  Delhi, Delhi

7. Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, West Bengal

8. Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, Uttarakhand

9. Xavior Labour Relations Institute (XLRI), Jamshedpur, Jharkhand

10. Indian Institute of Management, Indore, Madhya Pradesh

University

1.Indian Institute of Science, Banglore, Karnataka

2. Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Delhi

3. Banaras Hindu University

4. Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Banglore, Karnataka

5.Jadavpur University, Kolkata, West Bengal

6. Anna University, Chennai, Tamil Nadu

7. University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, Telangana

8. University of Delhi, Delhi

9. Amrita Vishwa Peetham, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu

10. Savitribai Phule  PuneUniversity, Pune, Maharshtra

Colleges

1.      Miranda House, Delhi, Delhi

2.      Loyola College, District Chennai, Tamil Nadu

3.      Shri Ram College of Commerce, New Delhi, Delhi

4.      Bishop Heber College, District Tiruchirapalli, Tamil Nadu

5.      Atma Ram Sanatan Dharma College,New Delhi, Delhi

6.      St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, West Bengal

7.      Lady Shri Ram College for Women,New Delhi, Delhi

8.      Dyal Singh College, Delhi, Delhi

9.      Deen Dayal Upadhyay College, New Delhi, Delhi

10.   The Women’s Christian College, Chennai, Tamil Nadu

The wheel of social justice

The wheel of social justice
New national commission for backward classes must address the gaps and lags in the Mandal project
The government’s decision to set up a National Commission for Socially and Educationally Backward Classes (NCSEdBC) in place of the existing National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC) meets long-standing demands. The Socially and Educationally Backward Classes (SEdBCs), and the Forum of BC MPs have asked for its constitution and the NCBC and the Parliamentary Committee on SEdBCs have recommended it. The usefulness and effectiveness of the commission depends on the functions entrusted to it and its composition.
The only function of the NCBC under the NCBC Act is to examine requests for inclusion of any class of citizens as a backward class in SEdBC lists and hear complaints of over-inclusion or under-inclusion of any class in such lists and to tender advice to the Central government, which shall ordinarily be binding upon the government. It is presumed that civil court powers given to the NCBC, provided to all commissions, will continue.
Another role of the NCBC is that it should be consulted by the Central government while undertaking the periodic revision of SEdBC lists “with a view to excluding from such lists those classes who have ceased to be backward classes or for including new backward classes”. The NCBC’s main function and its periodic role are laid out in the the Supreme Court’s directions in the judgment of November 16, 1992, which upheld the constitutional validity of the V.P. Singh government’s decision to implement the Mandal Commission recommendations, taken on the basis of my note as Secretary, Ministry of Welfare, in 1990.
If the NCSEdBC’s function and role are the same as that of NCBC, its usefulness for SEdBCs will be neither more nor less than the NCBC’s. Reportedly, the NCSEdBC will be entrusted with the additional function of grievance redress of SEdBCs. This is an improvement. Further, according to Union minister Venkaiah Naidu, a new Article 342(A) will make it mandatory to take the concurrence of Parliament for adding or deleting any community in the SEdBC list. This will introduce greater transparency. It is more difficult to get a wrong decision through Parliament, which is under constant public gaze and scrutiny, than through executive orders issued from within the four walls of executive office.
SEdBCs require not only list-inclusion and reservation, but also comprehensive and holistic development and advancement of each community towards equality with Socially Advanced Castes (SACs) in all parameters of development and welfare. The blueprint for this is contained in the Report of the Working Group on Empowerment of SEdBCs in the XII Plan prepared under my chairmanship, which stands even though the terminology of “plan” has been replaced by “vision”, “agenda”.
In view of this, the Commission should be entrusted with the work of advising and guiding the Centre and the states regarding measures undertaken and required to be undertaken; monitoring their effectiveness and the progress of SEdBCs and each Backward Class, and all other related tasks. This was recommended by the NCBC in its annual report of February 2000.
The existing statutory composition of a judge as chairperson, a central secretary-level officer as member-secretary, a social scientist and two persons possessing special knowledge of matters relating to SEdBCs should continue. All five members should be selected on the basis of objectivity, repute earned through long and sincere service for backward classes and knowledge and experience of society, social backwardness and developmental processes relevant to advancement of SEdBCs. They should not be attached to any political party.
To infuse confidence in the SEdBC public, the practice of ensuring majority of membership from SEdBCs should continue. Due representation should be ensured for most and extremely backward classes, who form a good majority of SEdBCs, among them castes of artisans, service-providers, fisher-folk, indigent castes etc. The past two chairpersons belonged to most backward classes — this is a precedent worth continuing. One of the five members may be from a religious minority — the bulk of India’s Muslims and Christians belong to most and extremely backward SEdBCs.
Anxiety has been expressed that the proposed move is intended to delete certain communities from SEdBC lists. Exclusion of castes which ceased to be backward was recommended by certain past commissions and specifically directed by the Supreme Court. Castes can be excluded only on the basis of objective data, not on anybody’s whims and fancies. Parliamentary scrutiny can further reduce the scope for arbitrary decisions.
The real danger that leaders have to protect SEdBCs from is inclusion of any socially advanced castes (SAC) in SEdBC lists. Certain SACs are making muscular efforts for this, knowing that they cannot succeed under the Constitution which provides for reservation and other social justice measures only for social classes who are victims of “untouchability” (SCs), victims of remoteness under vulnerable conditions (STs), victims of social inferiority or lowliness under the caste system (SEdBCs) and not for the poor or the unemployed. The poor and the unemployed who do not belong to these three social classes, should be helped through means such as scholarships and educational loans, but not through reservation. Parties should resist the temptation of using muscular agitations of powerful SACs for transient electoral advantage. There should be a common moral code based on constitutional norms and morality emphasised by B.R. Ambedkar, which should be binding on all parties. Issues relating to SEdBCs, SCs and STs are too serious and important for the vast majority of India’s population and for national progress to be made a football in electoral competition.
Another important task calling for the attention of leaders, the Commission and the government is the categorisation of SEdBCs into “backward”, “more backward”, “most backward” and “extremely backward” castes with sub-quotas, so as to spread the benefits of reservation and other social justice measures equitably. The Opposition should desist from knee-jerk and contradictory reactions. The government should improve its credibility by instituting, in article or rules, the process of members’ selection through a bipartisan collegium.
The name of “National Commission for Socially and Educationally Backward Classes” is correctly chosen in line with constitutional terminology. In 1951, Jawaharlal Nehru insisted on this name in a new clause (4) of Article 15. The acronym should be “NCSEdBC” and not “NCSEBC” because “E” can be misunderstood and misinterpreted as “economically” and misused for SAC caste entry into SEdBC list.

Seven IITs among India’s best 10 educational institutions, IISc tops list

Seven IITs among India’s best 10 educational institutions, IISc tops list
IISc topped the ‘overall’ and ‘universities’ categories in HRD Ministry’s ranking of India’s top educational institutions even as IIM-A was ranked the best management institute
The Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, the first Indian institution to make it to the top 10 in a global ranking, has been ranked at the top in the annual national rankings released by the HRD ministry.

Seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) have also made it to the list of the top 10 educational institutions released under the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), the other two being Banaras Hindu University (BHU) and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).

The results of the second edition of the domestic ranking were announced by HRD minister Prakash Javadekar in New Delhi on Monday. Unlike last year, this time the ranking was released under five categories—overall, colleges, universities, management and engineering.

IISc figured at the top in ‘overall’ and ‘universities’ categories. JNU, which was at third position in the last ranking, has been ranked second this year in ‘universities’ category. In the ‘overall’ ranking, the university, which has been at the centre of controversies for over a year, has been placed at the sixth position.

IIM-Ahmedabad and IIM-Bangalore have switched positions in the top management institute list. Last year the Bangalore institution was placed at the top and IIM-Ahmedabad was second. IIT-Madras continued to be at the top in the engineering institutions category.

Last month, IISc was ranked eighth in the Times Higher Education (THE) Rankings, 2017 in the “best small universities” category, joining the elite list that includes California Institute of Technology (Caltech) from the US, Ecole Normale Superieure from France and Pohang University of Science and Technology, South Korea.

The NIRF outlines a methodology to rank institutions across the country. The methodology draws from the overall recommendations and broad understanding arrived at by a core committee set up by the ministry, to identify the broad parameters for ranking various universities and institutions.

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

Prof. David R. Syiemlieh takes Oath as Chairman, UPSC

Prof. David R. Syiemlieh takes Oath as Chairman, UPSC

Prof. David R. Syiemlieh took the Oath of Office and Secrecy as Chairman, Union Public Service Commission, under clause (1) of Article 316 of the Constitution of India, today. The oath was administered by Shri Vinay Mittal, the senior most Member of the Commission, at a function at the UPSC office.

Prof. Syiemlieh joined the Commission as Member on June 25, 2012 and was later on appointed to perform the duties of the pos...

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