The government on Monday granted “institution of eminence” status to three public and three private educational institutions in India. Government institutions with this tag will get special funding of Rs 1,000 crore over the next five years, Union Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar said. The private organisations will get academic and administrative autonomy.
The Indian Institutes of Technology of Delhi and Mumbai and Bengaluru’s Indian Institute of Science are the three public sector institutions that have been chosen. The private institutions that have received this tag are Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, and the Reliance Foundation’s yet-to-be-set-up Jio Institute.
Private organisations seeking to set up educational institutions are eligible to apply for the status.
Jio Institute was selected under the “Greenfield Category” for new institutions and beat 10 other competitors, a government release said. The ministry said the expert committee had adopted four parameters for judging them: the availability of land, a core team with “very high qualification and wide experience”, available funding, and a strategic vision plan with clear annual milestones and action plan.
The ministry said the committee found that only Jio Institute had fulfilled all the parameters out of the 11 applicants.
The government asked an empowered expert committee last year to find 20 institutions with the potential to be world-class teaching and research institutions that could be given the tag. However, the panel failed to come up with any recommendations.
“We were asked to select 10 public and 10 private institutes to bag the tag of the ‘institutions of eminence’ but we could not find 20,” the panel’s head, former Chief Election Commissioner N Gopalaswami, told News18.
Following this, the University Grants Commission announced the names of the six institutions on Monday. “The selection of institutions of eminence will not only improve the quality of education but also propel competition in the entire education sector,” Javadekar had said earlier.
Corrections and clarifications: The strapline of this article has been edited to clarify that private institutions will obtain autonomy but not government funds.
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