The University of Mysore, which is plagued by staff shortage with the Government yet to approve recruitment, has witnessed a slide in the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) ranking for 2022 announced on Friday.
The University was ranked 33rd among the varsities in the country and has an overall ranking of 54 among institutions of higher education as per the NIRF ranking for 2022. This is a slide from the 19th position among the varsities and an overall rank of 34 held during 2021.
The NIRF which is under the Ministry of Education, Government of India, has conceived a slew of parameters including Teaching, Learning and Resources (TLR) Research and Professional Practice (RP), Graduation Outcome (GO), Outreach and inclusivity (OI) and Peer Perception (PR).
Under TLR, the varsity was awarded a score of 68.90 out of 100 but managed only 16.81 under RP which is the metric for publications, quality of publications, projects etc all of which are dependent on faculty strength. But with respect to GO, the varsity scored 90.68 while it secured 53.79 for OI but again scored only 4.80 in perception. The perception analysis is done by a survey conducted over a large category of employers and a large category of academics to ascertain their preference for graduates of different institutions.
The TLR takes into cognisance the student strength including doctoral students, faculty-student ratio with emphasis on permanent faculty and the university ranking is being affected by the latter.
As against a sanctioned strength of 667 teaching staff, the university has only 272 posts that have been filled up and this has led to an increase in the student-teacher ratio now pegged at 1:25. This was also the reason for the varsity’s decline in the NAAC rating as well.
G. Hemantha Kumar, Vice- Chancellor, University of Mysore, said it is a good performance of the University considering the dwindling number of permanent faculty members and other limiting factors. With each passing year the number of permanent staff on its rolls is declining consequent to the faculty members attaining superannuation and this affects the ranking, he added.
The Vice-Chancellor said the NIRF parameters are related to the quality of core activities of higher education institutes, excellence and effectiveness in teaching and learning, reaching out to the socially, economically and culturally unreached segments of the society and the University of Mysore has done well in all these parameters.
Going forward, the University will seek permanent faculty and impress upon the government to call for recruitments, said Prof. Hemantha Kumar.
‘’Once the staff strength goes up so will the students enrolling for PhD and the number of research papers published by the varsities. Within two years of completing the recruitment the varsity ranking can improve’’, said Prof. Hemantha Kumar.
But he maintained that despite the shortcomings, the University of Mysore has been consistently ranked among the top 50 varsities in the country and it has also figured high in the overall rank list among the institutes of higher education in the country.
