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IIT-BHU joins 7 others in boycotting Times rankings over ‘transparency’ complaints
New Delhi: The Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University), or IIT (BHU), on Monday joined seven other premier IITs and announced it will also boycott
New Delhi: The Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University), or IIT (BHU), on Monday joined seven other premier IITs and announced it will also boycott the prestigious Times Higher Education World University Rankings. The seven announced their boycott last week saying they are not satisfied with the transparency of the process.
“There are questions over the rankings criteria. This issue has been discussed for a long time. We have also decided to not participate like some of the other IITs,” IIT (BHU) director Pramod Kumar Jain said.
IIT Mandi director Timothy Gonsalves said his institute has not been participating in the rankings and will continue doing so.
IIT Ropar, which along with Bengaluru’s Indian Institute of Science (IISc) was placed in the 301 to 350 bracket in the last rankings, will continue taking part in the exercise.
“We are participating in the ranking exercise,” said Prof S K Das, IIT Ropar head.
The rankings agency said its World University Rankings were well established as the global gold standard international benchmark for world-class research universities.
“First published in 2004, our 2020 edition published last September included voluntary submissions from almost 1,400 institutions from 92 countries and regions,” it added in a statement.
“If leading universities in a nation with such a proud heritage of scholarly excellence, and with such huge opportunities for economic growth decline to take part in the gold standard rankings, we believe it would be detrimental to those institutions, and to India as a whole.”
It said transparency was at the heart of everything it did. “Our chief data officer visited Delhi in November 2019 to specifically engage with the IITs on our methodology, and in January 2020, our chief knowledge officer held a full one-day forum in Delhi for hundreds of guests, where the rankings data and methodology was front and centre.”
