New Delhi, Sept. 8: IIT Kharagpur or IIT Bombay?

Is IIM Ahmedabad really the best among India's B-schools?

Prospective students and their parents who have been trying to figure out the answers may have to wait till early next year. That's when the first government-monitored ranking of institutions should be out.

The human resource development ministry is ready with a set of criteria to rank higher education institutions that mainly teach engineering, management, humanities and law, sources said, adding the exercise would be launched later this month.

They said a panel of experts had prepared the criteria, following Prime Minister Narendra Modi's stress on a separate ranking system for Indian institutions.

The parameters include teaching and learning, research, professional practice and collaborative performance, placement, outreach and inclusiveness and peer perception.

International agencies like the Times Higher Education (THE) or Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) use similar parameters like citations per faculty or per paper, academic reputation, research publications, teaching and learning activities, international mix of staff and students and industry linkage.

But Indian institutions - which hardly figure among the world's top 200 ranked by the QS or THE - have been arguing that the criteria used by the international agencies don't capture the socio-economic role they play in terms of taking education to disadvantaged sections through benefits like reservation and interest-free loans.

Phil Baty, the London-based THE's ranking editor, welcomed the government's move but said leading Indian universities must ensure that they continue to have "ambitions to compete on a world stage".

"They need to be sure they are keeping up with the rest of the world and always, looking outwards, not inwards," he said in an email response.

While Baty said the parameters prepared by the Indian government appeared to be "very sensible", C. Raj Kumar, vice-chancellor of OP Jindal Global University, questioned the need for India-specific criteria. "There is no point reinventing the wheel. The international parameters are already there," he said.

Joanna Newman, vice-principal, international, King's College London, disagreed. Newman, now in Delhi to attend a seminar on "Globally connected universities", said the Indian ranking system was a step towards improving quality.

"I think ranking parameters can never be perfect. But ranking is certainly a tool to indicate broadly where a institution is lagging behind and what it needs to do," she said.

Members of the panel that has prepared the criteria said the National Board of Accreditation would assess and rank engineering and management institutes while the National Assessment and Accreditation Council would rank those that teach humanities and law.

All engineering institutes, including the IITs, will participate in the exercise that would involve two categories of rankings - one for those run by the government and another for the private ones.

The first list should be out by February.