The Ministry of Human Resource Development informed that the Empowered Expert Committee, a four-member committee, made by them for selecting Institutions of Eminence (IOE’s), recommends increasing the number of IOE’s from the current 20 to 30. The University Grants Commission gave the responsibility of entrusting the Institutions of Excellence to the IOE’s in February 2018.
In September 2017, University Grants Commission released a notification informing the formation of IOE’s, in order to establish 20 world class Universities in the country, since no Indian University was included in World University Ranking in 2016.
“The institution of Eminence shall continue to be ranked in the National institutional Ranking Framework and, within five years of notification, shall get itself ranked in an international Ranking index of repute. It should from then on continue to be ranked in the National and international ranking frameworks, ”the notification read in September, 2017.
“The EEC has recommended increasing the number of Institutions of Eminence to 30. However, the recommendations are yet to be considered by the UGC,” a senior HRD Ministry official said regarding the increase of IOE’s.
In the early January, Union Minister of State for HRD Satya Pal Singh informed the Parliament regarding the recommendations received by the EEC for increasing the number of IOE’s.
Last year the HRD Ministry in June granted the tag of ‘Institute of Eminence’ to three public institutions namely Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore; Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi and Bombay. Apart from the public institutions, private institutions also received the tag of IOE, those were Manipal Academy of Higher Education, BITS Pilani and Jio Institute by Reliance Foundation.
For the tag of IOE to the Jio Institute lead to a controversy which stated it had just been issued a ‘letter of intent’ and the conditioned required to receive the tag has not been fulfilled by the institute.
In December 2018, the EEC recommended 19 more names to be awarded the tag which included two public universities and seven private universities and five names to be kept in the reserve list.
The public institutions that were recommended by the EEC in December included Banaras Hindu University (BHU), Tezpur University, Savithribai Phule Pune University, University of Hyderabad, Aligarh Muslim University, Panjab University, and Andhra University.
The recommendations from the private sector included Sharda University, Ashoka University, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, VIT Vellore, Jamia Hamdard University, Azim Premji University, Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, OP Jindal Global University, Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Institute of Public Health Sciences and Satya Bharti University.
The Institutions selected to be awarded IOE status were given a grant of ₹1000 crore to meet the requirements to be able to confirm their position in World Class Rankings. The grant is only provided to the public institutions, for the private institutions they have the autonomy to decide their fee structure and courses.