Varsities eye eminence tag

Calcutta: Jadavpur and Calcutta universities will apply to the University Grants Commission (UGC) for the "institute of eminence" tag.

The UGC had announced in September that it would declare 20 universities in the country, 10 of them government-aided and the rest private, institutions of eminence to enable them to evolve into world-class teaching and research centres.

Government institutions ranked among the top 50 by the ministry of human resource development (HRD) would be eligible to apply for the status, the UGC had said.

Jadavpur University (JU) was ranked 12 "overall" among the country's premiere institutions, including the IITs, NITs and the IIMs, and state-aided, centrally-funded and private research institutes. The 2017 ranking exercise conducted under the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) put JU in the fifth place among all state and central universities and ninth in engineering.

The 20 institutions selected for the eminence status will receive a financial assistance of up to Rs 1,000 crore.

"Jadavpur University was ranked high in almost every assessment by agencies such as NIRF and NAAC. Given our high ratings, we should be able to get the eminence status. The process of submitting the application to UGC is on," said Jadavpur University vice-chancellor Suranjan Das.

JU is the only institute in the state to be graded A+ by NAAC (National Assessment and Accreditation Council), only a notch below the best in the last NAAC assessment of 2014. It scored a CGPA (cumulative grade point average) of 3.68 out of 4.

"We have been consistently working towards improving our ranking and that has been apparent whenever we have competed with other institutes in the country. We expect to excel this time too," Das said.

Calcutta University (CU) got grade A this year in the NAAC assessment, two notches below the best, scoring a CGPA of 3.2. In 2009, it had scored a CGPA of 3.3.

Sonali Chakravarti Banerjee, the CU vice-chancellor, said the university has received a letter from the HRD ministry confirming its eligibility to apply for the eminence status. "We are getting ready with all the information to be supplied to the UGC for seeking the eminence status," she said.

The institutes with the status of eminence will be able to decide their fee structure, particularly for foreign students, and curriculum.