NAAS to Rank 73 Agricultural Universities

The National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (NAAS) has given the responsibility of developing evaluation methodology. They have come up with a ranking framework and the ministry will soon ask the universities to participate in the process.

This process is inspired from the HRD ministry's recent move of issuing rankings of Indian Universities and the country's engineering, management and pharmaceutical institutes. So, from this the agriculture ministry has decided to exclusively rank 73 agricultural universities.

Key parameters to evaluate the agricultural universities in the country:

• Technology transfer to farmers, increase in agricultural growth in the area of jurisdiction of the university, quality inputs (seed, semen and planting materials) supplied by the universities
• Teaching
• Research impact
• Research excellence

"Once the Union agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh approves it, the ministry will hopefully announce the move next week", said an official.

Recently, a meeting was hosted by the minister of state for agriculture, Sanjeev Kumar Balyan in which the committee identified indicators for measuring the quality and performance of the agricultural universities and finalised the details for inviting application from participants. The entire ranking project is being handled by Balyan in the ministry.

The opinion of award winning and progressive farmers will also be taken into consideration while ranking the agricultural universities. Such farmers are identified and awarded every year by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and the ministry.

Their views will be taken as part of the confidential survey of stakeholders' perception, having weightage of seven out of total 100 marks. Retired faculty members of the universities and their alumni, based in India or abroad, will also free to give their opinion in this survey.

"The final ranking will be done on the basis of the marks obtained by the participating universities. Idea is to ask all the 73 agricultural universities to participate in it", said the official.

It is expected that the process of ranking will help the agricultural universities to self-assess themselves on the quality and enhance their abilities, says the ministry's note on " Ranking of Agricultural Universities ".

It also says, "Ranking of agricultural universities has been initiated with a larger objective to improve ranking of Indian universities in the world university ranking".