New courses, community outreach, startups has boosted rank in NIRF: IIT Madras
Institute aims to improve its social outreach, research output and startup ecosystem
Focus on improving aspects such as research output, sustainable development goal, gender parity, reaching out to the local community through teaching and CSR programmes, patent filing, and start-ups had pushed up the marks in National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), said IIT-Madras officials.
IIT-Madras is ranked first in the overall category and among engineering institutions. It is ranked second in innovation, IIT-Bombay ranked first, and in research it is next only to the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru.
IIT Madras director V. Kamakoti said the institute has done better than last year and the difference between the first and second rank has changed significantly. In a country like India that aspires to have a gross enrolment ratio of 50%, systems such as NIRF are necessary, he said.
“The population in the age group of 15 to 35 need to be educated. We have made a lot of effort for this. This has created a good perception about IIT Madras,” Mr. Kamakoti said. Rajnish Kumar, chairperson of the ranking committee, IIT Madras, accompanied him at the press conference.
The institute’s outreach activities such as scholarships to 5,000 socially disadvantaged candidates enrolled in the BS Data Science course, the distribution of electronics kits to 30,000 school children in the State were acknowledged as efforts to achieve the World Health Organisation’s Sustainable Development Goal 4, which is to ensure affordable, equitable, quality education for all, Mr. Kamakoti said.
The institute’s programmes such as department of medical science, school for interdisciplinary studies, experiments such as creating supernumerary seats for sportspersons, making a conscious effort to appoint more women faculty, and launching more startups, helped.
He cited the success of startups such as Agnikul, Mindgrow which developed a chip; hyperloop and Abhyudhay as achievements that brought the institution recognition. “We will make all effort to achieve the academic requirement needed. All effort will be taken to ensure that all students in our country complete minimum under graduation at least,” he said.
The institute has proposed to launch a BSc Mathematics and Computer Science programme with the aim of creating at least 500 quality math teachers. The course will be offered in collaboration with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Candidates will study B Sc course online and the B Ed programme will be offline.
There is also a proposal to help develop a ranking system for African nations on the lines of NIRF, Mr. Kamakoti said.
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