Environmental regulatory system should be bridge between community, industry

 

The pandemic presents an opportunity for us to think of a new recovery path, one that can decouple economic growth and environmental degradation

In a conversation, the moment it is evident that I am from Kerala, the first comment usually is that it is a beautiful state. The conversation typically extends to saying that no industry can survive in Kerala. I defend my state by stating that, not many companies are mature enough to operate in Kerala. Having said that, the Kerala diaspora is a well-known story. The state also has a high debt ratio and in recent times, has been one of the slow economic growth states. I am not implying that the industrialised states of India are much better, but there is something not quite right.

The pandemic presents an opportunity for us to think of a new recovery path, one that can decouple economic growth and environmental degradation. It becomes more important as India sees opportunities on the global call to diversify the supply chain and its internal call for Atmanirbhar Bharat. For that, we need to strengthen our production and manufacturing capabilities.

Indian cities feature high in the list of polluted cities in the world, and the country features very low on quality of life. At the same time, any discussion on more production facilities, mining, utilities and construction evokes fears about where we are going wrong. We have all the environmental regulations we need, but the biggest gap lies in monitoring and implementing them. Take the municipal solid waste rules. Two decades after the regulations came into effect, their status is for all to see. A comparatively recent regulation, centred around Extended Producer Responsibility, has also posed challenges in monitoring and implementation. In a recent ruling, the judiciary not only ruled against the industry but also blamed officials responsible for implementing the regulations. This will not help us in capitalising on the current opportunity. Regulatory infrastructure is supposed to be the bridge of trust between the community and industry. If the bridge is not stable, the community and industry feel the impact, which, over a period of time, spreads to the nation.

No community wants an industrial facility, a key economic engine, shut unless there are very serious issues. Other than an accident, such problems don’t happen over a day. When early signs from the environment are neglected, they reach thresholds leading to a community upsurge. Then the political system intervenes. It is a battle that nobody wins. Even as a nation, we have shown inability to showcase growth in a sustainable manner.

Diluting regulatory requirements is not a solution — in the long run, it will create more adverse impacts resulting in greater community upsurge. The focus has to be to improve the system’s capabilities to monitor and implement regulatory requirements. There needs to be greater transparency and accountability; there is no dearth of technology to facilitate this. Around the world, we are also debating another issue of extreme surveillance. Since somebody is always watching, spotting, noticing or identifying the problem should not be a challenge. But what happens after that is a challenge. The intention and capacity to take action, rectify and diffuse is critical. The right ecosystem between the industry, community and regulator is crucial — if the three stakeholders remain isolated and get activated only in a crisis, we will not make any progress towards solving the issue.

I will go back to Kerala to discuss an initiative by the state’s police — Janamaithri Suraksha. It aims to bridge the gap between the police and public with citizens’ involvement. We need similar maithri, an improved level of trust, between the regulator, community and industry on environmental protection. The conventional manner of waiting for an agitation, investigating and then knocking on the doors of justice is not the way to sustainable development.

Any anthropogenic activity will have impacts. It is important to understand whether we have a net positive effect from all stakeholders’ perspectives, wherein the future generation is also a key stakeholder. I wrote earlier that the way forward is to decouple economic growth and environmental degradation. However, it would be more right to say that we need to couple growth and environmental protection. Environmental health will be the key enabler of socio-economic growth in the future.

It is important for us to get this right quickly. Community activism in terms of environmental damage is surging and we will have more judgments from the courts. Nobody benefits from such outcomes in the long run. We need to grow to keep progressing, and for that we need industries. When trust between the industry and community erodes, there are more agitations.

By focusing on the bridge element of the regulatory system, I am not undermining the role of industry and the community. Industry needs to realise that it is a part of an ecosystem and not at the centre of it. Communities get impacted, either positively or negatively. They need to empower themselves through education, so that they are not driven by the agenda of individuals with vested interests.

We need to accept that we have a challenge in implementing environmental regulations. The community does not trust that the industry is meeting its compliance requirements. The regulatory system’s role is to improve this trust quotient. There is a need to evolve a more effective implementation involving all stakeholders, and a more transparent monitoring system. There is, thus, a necessity for a maithri system.

As we plan our recovery past the pandemic, we have a good chance to create a new normal. We need to align towards a common cause and goals. We should not miss this chance.

This article first appeared in the print edition on September 1, 2020 under the title ‘Address the trust deficit’. Jayaram is partner and head, Climate Change and Sustainability Advisory, KPMG India

Source: Indian Express, 1/09/20

Government needs to act urgently to conclude NRC process in Assam

 

The authorities have not been treating this matter with the gravity that it deserves. Shifting the goalposts for political gains reflects an extraordinary lack of regard for the people who have been excluded.

Nurjehan Begum, a 45-year-old home maker from the flood-ravaged Bongaigaon district in northwest Assam, struggles to be optimistic. The devastating combination of the recent floods and COVID-19 lockdown has exacted a significant toll on her family. But that is not her biggest fear: 2020 marks the end of Nurjehan’s three-year confinement in one of Assam’s six dreaded detention centres, the final destination for those who are deprived of their right to citizenship in the state. While she is silent about the trauma she has experienced, Nurjehan does not hesitate to share her deepest fear — her family could now face the same fate, as they too have been excluded from the National Register of Citizens (NRC).

On August 31, 2019, the final list of the NRC in Assam was released. This was considered to be the culmination of decades of strife and agitation in the state over the question of continued presence of “illegal immigrants” and the urgent need to identify and deport them. The NRC was envisaged as a comprehensive record of citizens in Assam, identified by the law of the land as persons who had migrated to Assam before March 25, 1971. The legal home for the NRC is found in the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003. The updation of the NRC was sanctioned by the Supreme Court, which, in 2014, began monitoring the entire process.

Five years, 5,5000 employees, and Rs 1,200 crore were only the visible administrative costs — this does not include the lives that were lost, primarily out of fear of exclusion. The loss of citizenship, after all, is the loss of one of the most crucial rights a person can have; in its absence, one’s entire body of rights disappears. Conversations on the ground revealed that initially, people from across the spectrum agreed on the NRC. People who belong to the ethno-religious category of Bengali-Muslim origin were relieved at the prospect that inclusion in the NRC would end the cloud of suspicion over their heads. On the other end, of the spectrum, the indigenous Assamese population welcomed the NRC as fulfilling the aim of weeding out “immigrants”.

The result of the NRC list has been well documented — 1.9 million people were excluded from its ambit and now face the prospect of filing appeals against this exclusion before the quasi-judicial body known as the Foreigners Tribunal (FT).

Set up in 1964 under the Foreigners (Tribunals) Order, the FT is the main legal body with the power to determine who is a citizen in the context of Assam. As has been extensively documented, this process of citizenship determination is riddled with flaws. The burden of proving one’s status is on the person who faces scrutiny. S/he is expected to provide stringent documentary proof of citizenship, despite there being no clarity from the state on what documents meet this evidentiary standard. (It has been held that Aadhaar cards, PAN cards, land records, birth certificates and passports may not amount to proof.) Oral testimony is frequently disregarded, and the tribunal is quick to dismiss paperwork on flimsy grounds such as minor errors in spelling or dates. The main test of citizenship according to the Tribunal is the ability to trace one’s legacy to a person who had been residing in the state before 1971. Applying such a high standard of documentary evidence flies in the face of the ground realities of the country. Moreover, there are serious concerns around the judicial independence of the tribunals. Members are appointed by the home and political departments of the Assam government, and the performance of tribunal members is incentivised based on the number of persons they declare as foreigners. This implies biases entrenched in the system. As a result, around 1.3 lakh people have been declared foreigners since the inception of the FTs. Like Nurjehan, many declared foreigners are sent to languish in detention centres.

The potential repercussions from the NRC exclusions could be catastrophic. It does not help that the appeals process is fraught with delays; one year on, there is no sign of when this process will begin and decisions such as the re-checking of rejection orders to exclude people only add to the uncertainty.

Vulnerable populations are poised to suffer grave consequences in the absence of legal clarity. For instance, there are multiple instances of children who have been excluded from the NRC. Will they be extended protections as per the law governing juveniles in the country? Will they be separated from their parents and sent to detention if they are unable to prove their citizenship? What guarantees are in place for the protection of their rights? We only have questions to which there seem to be no answers.

The state machinery’s track record is one of see-sawing. In 2019, the Ministry of External Affairs described the NRC process as “statutory, transparent, legal”, a “fair process based on scientific methods”. In almost the same breath, it has called for the NRC to be scrapped. Shifting these goalposts for political gains reflects an extraordinary lack of regard for the people who have been excluded. Those included in the NRC are also waiting for the final list to be gazetted.

The authorities have not been treating this matter with the gravity that it deserves. Justice delayed, as the adage goes, is justice denied. The state needs to take urgent steps to move the NRC process forward as soon as possible and to ensure that guarantees of due processes are in place. Otherwise, in the words of Nurjehan Begum, “citizenship will remain a dark cloud looming over (our) lives”.

This article first appeared in the print edition on September 1, 2020 under the title ‘Year of uncertainty’. Baruah is a Guwahati-based lawyer and graduate student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Boston. Wadud is a Guwahati-based human rights lawyer. Both work with the Justice and Liberty Initiative, which takes on cases of those deprived of citizenship in Assam

Source: Indian Express, 1/09/20

Social media: The new theatre of India’s culture wars

 

Big technology firms are mediating content, impinging on democracy. Hold them accountable.

The phenomenal rise of social media (SM) platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and others is proving to be a double-edged sword in the functioning of democracies. On the one hand, it has democratised access to information. On the other hand, it has concentrated power over that information with a handful of private companies, their billionaire owners, and certain ideologically committed activist groups.

Billions of netizens around the world now feel empowered to bypass traditional curators of information, such as journalists and editors, in searching for their choice of content. They have also become creators and disseminators of content, not just consumers of it. This is further accentuated by tech platforms directing more content at people similar to what they have already seen, thus creating echo chambers of like-minded groups.

This is already known. What is happening now, however, is the next stage of that transformation in how information is generated, disseminated, and consumed, and it is directly impacting how democracies function. There is a global war underway, involving the role of SM and freedom of expression, which is an extension of the culture wars between the Left and Right.

India is seeing the early skirmishes of the online version of this war, which has already progressed to a much higher intensity elsewhere, most notably the United States (US). In America’s bitterly polarised polity, the frontline of this war is a battle between Twitter and President Donald Trump. The former’s flagging of a presidential tweet as fake news, and the latter’s executive order altering the liability of SM platforms who edit content, is worth understanding better.

One of the most stark aspects of the West’s culture wars has been its erosion of the right to freedom of expression, which had been a hallmark of its modern democracies. Especially since the early 20th century, US Supreme Court rulings by the legendary Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, interpreting its Constitution’s first amendment, had established what many considered a gold standard of free speech.

While those struggles for free speech had pushed for more freedom, even to say and write very unpleasant things, the intensification of the West’s culture wars in this century has seen a reversal of that trend. Curbs on hate speech became widely accepted and implemented. But, thereafter, there has been a relentless push by so-called woke activists for ever more curbs on speech, often implemented forcefully and without consensus, based solely on political correctness.

A key aspect of this has been the shift from earlier activism against governments clamping down on speech to a focus instead on pushing media, and especially SM, to impose curbs on politically incorrect speech.

The irony in this new activism for speech curbs is that it is being championed by those who call themselves liberals. Of course, this does not represent classical liberal philosophy, and is instead a reflection of the far-Left takeover of present-day liberalism. This is visible around the world, whether in the forced withdrawal of a US academic’s paper contradicting the zeitgeist about race relations, or in the unsavoury departures of senior staff at the once venerable New York Times, after they had dared to publish op-eds reflecting Centre-Right views. In India, this bullying has manifested itself in the ganging up by self-avowed “liberal” authors to stop the publication of a book contradicting their narrative on this year’s Delhi riots.

Such far-Left canons have now invaded the realm of big tech firms. That should hardly be a surprise, considering Silicon Valley’s preference for recruiting “liberal” and “woke” employees. Books and articles by conservative authors such as Douglas Murray and business journalists such as George Anders have documented explicit hiring policies, practices and statistics to confirm Left-wing dominance among SM employees. It was, therefore, inevitable that employee activism would push these platforms into adopting leftist, illiberal policies.

The inconsistencies in those policies show up when SM platforms apply selective standards, such as when Twitter was accused of hypocrisy for not flagging or proscribing the aggressive, warlike tweet of a West Asian leader.

President Trump’s executive order directly impacts this. In US law, SM had been protected against the kind of liabilities — such as defamation — that traditional news media are subject to, on the grounds that SM are simply platforms for others’ opinions and did not edit or otherwise shape that information. But now that they are, by flagging, shadow banning, or deleting posts and accounts, the Trump order echoes many voices that had been asking for SM to be treated on par with media outlets.

A similar battle is raging about SM giants’ abuse of their massive power by sourcing news from media companies without paying for it, and then disseminating and profiting from it. Despite a bitter legal struggle, Australia is likely to become the first nation to require Google to pay for such content.

These battles are relevant to India, which is both the largest democracy as well as one of the largest user bases for SM platforms. Some of these battles have already begun here, such as the recent Indian version of the West’s leftist pressure on Facebook to put curbs on Right-wing posts. It is time to broaden the dialogue here about how India ought to respond.

Source: Hindustan Times, 31/08/2020

Quote of the Day August 28, 2020

 “What the mind can conceive, it can achieve.”

‐ Napoleon Hill

“हम अगर किसी चीज़ की कल्पना कर सकते हैं तो उसे साकार भी कर सकते हैं।”

‐ नेपोलियन हिलq

Economic & Political Weekly: Table of Contents

 

Vol. 55, Issue No. 34, 22 Aug, 2020

Editorials

Kashmir after Article 370

On the Conundrum of Inequality

From the Editor's Desk

The Idea of the Sacred Place

Gopal Guru

H T Parekh Finance Column

RBI Moves to Shake Up Governance at Banks

T T Ram Mohan

Law and Society

Clarifying the Rights of Daughters as Coparceners

Alok Prasanna Kumar

Commentary

National Education Policy, 2020 - Long on Rhetoric and Short on Substance

Praveen Jha, Pooja Parvati

A Donkey’s Wisdom - Can Literature Help Us Respond to the China–India Border Clash?

Adhira Mangalagiri

The ‘Memory’ of a Historian - Hari Shankar Vasudevan (1952–2020)

Animesh Gupta

Review Article

Alarmingly Simplified Data Gathering

Vickram Crishna

Perspectives

Spectacle as a Response - The COVID-19 Pandemic

Farhana Latief, Reyazul Haque

Special Articles

Extending Design Thinking to Public Policy - A Prototype for Fiscal Rule

R K Pattnaik, Ranjan Banerjee

Anthropological Archives - Dalit Religion Redux

Saurabh Dube

Landlessness and Agrarian Inequality without Landlordism - Caste, Class and Agrarian Structure in Bihar

Gaurang R Sahay

Notes

Labour Market Changes in India, 2005–18 - Missing the Demographic Window of Opportunity?

Jayan Jose Thomas

Current Statistics

Current Statistics

Appointments/Programmes/Announcements

Advertisements

From 50 Years Ago

From 50 Years Ago: Plastic Performer

Letters

MPI and Covid-19

N Rajagopal

The Sunderbans in Crisis

Abhiroop Chowdhury, Raghuveer Nath, Armin Rosencranz

Rajkumari Amrit Kaur: The princess who built AIIMS

 On February 18, 1956, the then minister of health, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, introduced a new bill in the Lok Sabha. She had no speech prepared. But she spoke from her heart. “It has been one of my cherished dreams that for post graduate study and for the maintenance of high standards of medical education in our country, we should have an institute of this nature which would enable our young men and women to have their post graduate education in their own country,” she said.

The creation of a major central institute for post-graduate medical education and research had been recommended by the Health survey of the government of India, a decade ago in 1946. Though the idea was highly appreciated, money was a concern. It took another 10 years for Kaur to collect adequate funds, and lay the foundation of India’s number one medical institute and hospital.

Kaur’s speech in the Lok Sabha sparked a vigorous debate in the house over the nature of the institute. But the bill moved fast, gaining the approval of members of both the houses, and by May that year, the motion was adopted.The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) was born. “I want this to be something wonderful, of which India can be proud, and I want India to be proud of it,” said Kaur, as the bill was passed in the Rajya Sabha.

In the past few months, as India has been battling a global pandemic, the role of the country’s apex medical body has come under discussion on several occasions. Significantly, it is the first prime minister of the country, Jawaharlal Nehru, who is credited for the heights reached by AIIMS. It is true that AIIMS came to be under the Nehru government. However, the real driving force behind it was Kaur.

A princess of the Kapurthala princely state, a student at Oxford university, a devout follower of Mahatma Gandhi, and an important member of the Constituent Assembly, Kaur was all of this and much more. Members of her family like to remember her as someone who believed in simple living and high thinking. The pages of history, on the other hand, celebrates her determination to drive out the British, her feminist zeal, and also the many contributions she had made to the health infrastructure of the country.

The Kapurthala princess

As a member of the Kapurthala princely family, Kaur had an interesting history. Her father, Raja Sir Harnam Singh, had converted to Protestant Christianity after a chance meeting with a Bengali missionary named Golakhnath Chatterjee in Jalandhar. Singh went on to marry his daughter, Priscilla, and had ten children with her. Kaur, the youngest among them was born on February 2, 1889.Kaur, therefore, was brought up as a Protestant Christian. After spending her early years in India, she was sent off to England for her education. “Princess Amrit Kaur was as much a product of Edwardian England as she was of India,” suggested her obituary in the New York Times in 1964. She completed her schooling from the Sherborne School for Girls, in Dorset, and then went to study at Oxford University. Thereupon, she returned to India in 1908 at the age of 20, and embarked on a life of nationalism and social reform.

“It is important to note that though a devout Christian, she was very much against missionary activities,” says Siddhant Das (27), great grand nephew of Amrit Kaur, and an entrepreneur who is currently living in Chandigarh, but spends most of his time doing research on her life and career. “She was a zealous patriot who believed that missionaries were alienating Indians from their cultural roots,” he explains.

The Gandhian and social reformer

Upon her return from England, Kaur was immediately drawn towards the ideas of nationalism, as she interacted with leaders like Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Mahatma Gandhi. She was mesmerised by the teachings of Gandhi, and shared an enduring, special friendship with him, as is evident from the collection of letters shared between the two, that have been compiled in the book, ‘Letters to Rajkumari Amrit Kaur’.

“What drew me to Bapu was his desire to have women in his non-violent army and his faith in womankind. This was an irresistible appeal to a woman in a land where women were fit for producing children and serving their lords as masters,” she is quoted as having said by American philosopher Richard Gregg in his introductory note in ‘Letters to Amrit Kaur.’

Though she wanted to join the naionalist movement soon after she returned, her family was against her involvement in the struggle, and therefore she kept away till her father passed away in 1930. During this period though, she was actively involved in social reforms particularly those related to women. Consequently, she waged a battle against the purdah system, the devadasi system, and child marriage. In 1927, she helped in the founding of the All India Women’s Conference and later served as its president.

By 1930, as she joined the Gandhian movement, she was imprisoned for her participation in the Dandi march. She gave up all her princely comforts to join Gandhi at his ashram in Sabarmati. “I remember Rajkumari sitting at the spinning wheel and eating along with other ashramites, the simple fare prescribed by Gandhiji,” wrote political activist Aruna Asaf Ali about her fondest memory of Kaur. “Rajkumari Amrit Kaur belonged to a generation of pioneers. They belonged to well- to-do homes but gave up on their affluent and sheltered lives and flocked to Gandhiji’s banner when he called women to join the national liberation struggle,” she added.

In her battle for a free India, she became one of the few women members of the Constituent assembly. She along with Hansraj Jivraj Mehta were the only female members to be ardently in support of the uniform civil code in the constitution.

The passionate health minister who created AIIMS

Nihar Mahindar Singh, the 58-year-old grand niece of Kaur, recalls that as a child she would visit Kaur’s house in New Delhi frequently, as she was getting treated at AIIMS. “I never received any preferential treatment for being her family member. I remember spending hours at a stretch on the corridors of AIIMS. I didn’t even know back then that aunt B (as Kaur was referred to in her family), had created the hospital,” she says, adding that it was much later, and by word of mouth from her family members that she learned of her grand aunt’s contribution in building AIIMS.

As an institute of healthcare and medical research, AIIMS had to have some unique features. To begin with, it was the first of its kind in Asia to prohibit doctors from private practise of any kind. Secondly, the doctors at AIIMS were to devote their time not only to treating patients and teaching, but also to carry out research. “All the staff and students were to be housed in the campus of the Institute in the best traditions of the Guru-Sishya ideal to stay in close touch with each other,” writes V. Srinivas, the deputy director of administration at AIIMS in his article, ‘The making of AIIMS: The parliamentary debate’.

As health minister, Kaur was the pivotal force in ensuring the unique status enjoyed by AIIMS. Yet, it is worth noting, that she was in fact not the first choice of Nehru to be part of the cabinet. “In August 1947, for the woman member of the cabinet, Nehru thought of Hansa Mehta, but took Rajkumari Amrit Kaur at Gandhi’s insistence,” writes author Sankar Ghose, in his book, ‘Jawaharlal Nehru – A Biography’. Writing about why Kaur was not preferred, he explains, “she was sometimes indiscreet and intemperate in her criticism of Congressmen.”Nonetheless, Kaur went on to become India’s first health minister. When the issue of funds for AIIMS came up, it was she who was instrumental in acquiring a huge amount from the New Zealand government. Over the years, she rallied around and was successful in getting donations from international bodies like the Rockefeller foundation, and the Ford foundation, as well as from the government of Australia, West Germany, as well as from the Dutch government.

During its diamond jubilee celebrations at AIIMS, Srinivas wrote a feature on Kaur for the Press Information Bureau (PIB), wherein he emphasised that Kaur protected the autonomous nature of the institute and ensured that an international face was created for it. “Rajkumari Amrit Kaur’s vision envisaged selection of students for admission to the under-graduate MBBS course in AIIMS is made after an open advertisement, on the results of an open competitive test, strictly on merit with equal opportunities to students from any part of the country,” he writes. It was her efforts, therefore, that led to entrance examinations being conducted for admission at AIIMS from 1956.

By 1961 itself, AIIMS had attained global repute as it was placed alongside the best of institutes from America, Canada and Europe.

Kaur chaired her last governing body meeting of AIIMS on August 14, 1963, wherein she donated her residence at Shimla, Manorville, to AIIMS as a space meant for the relaxation and recreation of the doctors and nurses of the institute.

Apart from passionately laying the foundation of AIIMS, she also founded the Indian Council of Child Welfare and became its first president. She was president of the Indian Leprosy Association, the Tuberculosis Association, and vice-president of the International Red Cross Society. She led the Indian delegation to the World Health Organisation (WHO) for four years and was president of the WHO assembly in 1950.

Her largest campaign as health minister though, was against Malaria. “At the height of the campaign, in 1955, it was estimated that 400,000 Indians who otherwise would have died had been saved by mitigation of malaria in their districts,” says the NYT obituary.

Earlier this year, Kaur was listed by TIME magazine as the woman of the year 1947. In noting her achievements and contributions, the magazine writes, “In leaving her life of luxury, Kaur not only helped build lasting democratic institutions, she also inspired generations to fight for the marginalized.”

Written by Adrija Roychowdhury

Source: Indian Express, 27/08/20

Why global university rankings miss Indian educational institutions

 

Since universities are complex organisations with multiple objectives, comparing universities using a single numerical value is as ineffectual as comparing a civil engineer with a biologist or a linguist and a dancer.

The best indicators of a university’s performance are the learning outcomes and how its education has impacted the students and society. The hype surrounding the announcement of world university rankings by international ranking organisations is unfortunate. Regardless of whether the rankings are beneficial or not, more universities than ever before want to get into these rankings. The obsession to be within the top 100 universities in the world is exasperating. Since there is a potential danger of creating elitism among universities through this ranking, lower-ranked universities may lose out on many counts. Some top-ranked universities want to collaborate only with other top-ranked universities, impairing the less fortunate ones to further sink due to inescapable stigmatisation.

International ranking organisations also force universities to alter their core missions. This has happened with JNU. Although JNU ranks between 100 and 200 in certain disciplines, it does not find a place in world university rankings. The reason is JNU does not offer many undergraduate programmes. We were indirectly told to start more undergraduate programmes in order to scale the ranking order while our university is predominantly a research-oriented institution.

First, let me state the obvious. Indian institutions lose out on perception, which carries almost 50 per cent weightage in many world university ranking schemes. Psychologists know that perception is a result of different stimuli such as knowledge, memories, and expectancies of people. While one can quantitatively measure the correlation between stimuli and perception, perception cannot be a quantifiable standalone parameter. Therefore, perception as a major component in the ranking process can easily lead to inaccurate or unreasonable conclusions.

Rightly or wrongly, international ranking organisations use citations as a primary indicator of productivity and scientific impact a discipline makes. However, studies show that the number of citations per paper is highest in multidisciplinary sciences, general internal medicine, and biochemistry, and it is the lowest in subjects such as visual and performing arts, literature and architecture. It is nobody’s case that the latter subjects are of any less importance. By making citations of published papers from a university as a strong parameter for rankings, we seem to have developed an inexplicable blind spot when it comes to the differences among subject disciplines. It is no wonder that universities such as JNU, whose student intake in science research programmes is less as compared to the other disciplines, will loose out in world university rankings although it has been rated as the second-best university in India.

International ranking organisations are too rigid in their methodology and are not willing to add either additional parameters or change the weightage of current parameters. They are disinclined to employ meaningful and universally fair benchmarks of quality and performance. This is an absolute requisite to take into account the diversity that prevails among the universities. Some Indian higher education institutions even decided not to participate in the world university rankings alleging a lack of transparency in the parameters that are used in the ranking process.

Since universities are complex organisations with multiple objectives, comparing universities using a single numerical value is as ineffectual as comparing a civil engineer with a biologist or a linguist and a dancer. Hence, the danger that such skewed world rankings will downgrade the university education to a mere commodity is a realistic trepidation. This inelastic stance of ranking organisations has forced more than 70 countries to have their own national ranking systems for higher educational institutions.

I had argued in an editorial in IETE Technical Review (March 2015) for India to have its own national ranking system. The MHRD established the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) in 2016. The parameters used by NIRF for ranking Indian institutions are also most suited for many other countries — among the parameters are teaching, learning & resources, research and professional practice, graduation outcomes, outreach and inclusivity and peer perception. Unlike international ranking organisations, NIRF gives only 10 per cent weightage for perception.

In 2016, the NIRF rankings were given in four categories — University, Engineering, Management and Pharmacy. College, Medical, Law, Architecture and Dental were added in 2020. This shows how NIRF is refining its ranking methodology by taking inputs from the stakeholders, which the international ranking organisations seldom do. No right-minded person can plausibly argue against such a ranking system, which recognises and promotes the diversity and intrinsic strengths of Indian educational institutes.

International ranking organisations are often sightless about what it takes to build a world-class educational system as compared to a world-class university. If a country has a world-class educational system with a focus on innovation, best teaching-learning processes, research-oriented towards social good, affirmative action plans for inclusive and accessible education, it will have a more visible social and economic impact.

Indian higher educational institutes need to ask themselves: What positive role can they play in improving the quality of higher education? What can we do to adopt innovative approaches to become future ready? And they need to act on those questions to make a change and plan beyond what is obvious.

NIRF will stimulate healthy competition among Indian educational institutes, which should eventually lead to a world-class Indian educational system. This system will act as a catalyst for the transformation of local universities to world-class institutions.

This article first appeared in the print edition on August 28, 2020 under the title ‘Home and the world’. The writer is Vice-chancellor, JNU.

Source: Indian Express, 28/08/20