Here’s why DU heavyweights like LSR & SRCC lagged in NIRF rankings. But that’s not the whole story

An analysis by ThePrint suggests drop in rankings for LSR, SRCC is due to their lower scores on ‘research and professional practice’ parameter. But there are more factors at play.

File photos of DU colleges SRCC and LSR | Courtesy: Official websites

New Delhi: Considered India’s second-best college by the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) just three years earlier, Lady Shri Ram College (LSR) for Women has now fallen from the 9th spot in 2023 to the 10th spot in this year’s rankings. Meanwhile, another top Delhi University (DU)-affiliated institution, Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC), which was at the 11th spot in 2023, has fallen to the 19th place this year.

This unexpected drop in rankings for two of Delhi’s most prestigious colleges has sparked a debate: how could these institutions, known for setting 100 percent cut-offs for admissions in the past—a metric that confirms they remain a top choice for students pursuing undergraduate courses—fail to secure even a top-five spot?

The answer, lies in the methodology of ranking.

NIRF ranks colleges based on several key parameters, one of which is ‘research and professional practice’ or RP. This parameter primarily includes research publications, which are usually peer-reviewed papers presenting original research findings. The quality of these publications, determined by their contribution to the field and number of citations, reflect the papers’ impact and influence within the academic community.

An analysis by ThePrint reveals that one reason for the drop in rankings for LSR and SRCC is due to these colleges receiving lower scores in the RP category. But the reasons behind these low scores are complex and significantly influenced by the specialisations offered by the colleges.

DU colleges & research parameter 

The NIRF evaluates educational institutes based on five parameters: ‘Teaching, Learning, and Resources’ or TLR; ‘research and professional practice’ or RP; ‘Graduation Outcomes’ or GO; ‘Outreach and Inclusivity’ or OI; and ‘Perception’ or PR.

Analysis of the NIRF data over the past three years reveals that top Delhi University colleges like LSR, SRCC and to some extent, St. Stephen’s, despite performing well on  most parameters, are lagging in the RP category. For instance, LSR achieved a score of 29.01 out of 100 in RP this year, its highest in the past five years. But its ranking has slipped over time, with scores of 25.49 in 2023, 20.54 in 2022, and 14.56 in 2021.

This decline can be attributed to other colleges, such as Atma Ram Sanatan Dharma (ARSD) College and Hindu College, improving their RP scores concurrently. 

ARSD College, despite scoring lower in three of the five parameters compared to LSR, has the highest RP score among all DU colleges at 94.84. 

Similarly, Hindu College’s RP score increased significantly from 25.56 in 2021 to 59.88 this year, contributing to its rise from 9th place in 2021 to 1st this year.

St. Stephen’s College moved up from 14th last year to 4th this year, but its RP score of 36.28 remains lower than that of ARSD. 

Meanwhile, SRCC saw a gradual decline in its ranking due to poor research output, falling to 19th this year from 11th in 2023, 12th in 2022, and 10th in 2021.

Science v/s non-science colleges 

Majority DU faculty members ThePrint spoke to argued that comparing colleges offering science colleges primarily with humanities- and commerce-dominant colleges is not the most apt way to evaluate them. 

Jyoti Darbari, NIRF coordinator at LSR, told ThePrint that colleges above them in the NIRF list are primarily science colleges. “They have all the science subjects including physics, chemistry, zoology and botany. Our college has only two science disciplines—mathematics and statistics—and both are not experimental-based like physics and chemistry.”

Highlighting that the third party sources the NIRF uses to extract information on scholarly output has search engines showing only Scopus (scientific abstract and citation database) and a web of science-indexed journals, Darbari said, “These are all science-dominated engines. We have a teacher in the Hindi department who has written so many books but none of her articles have been included in the NIRF rankings.

“A faculty in the journalism department has received the president’s award for her book but again, none of her publications are counted in the NIRF rankings.”

Darbari added that it is comparatively difficult for teachers of social disciplines to get a paper published with Scopus or other science-indexed journals. 

“It’s not that we are not doing research in humanities and commerce courses. We have a lot of research going on. The teachers may have 10 papers published but may not be considered because they are looking at Scopus and the web of science journals. They are not even looking at UGC CARE (Consortium for Academic and Research Ethics) journals even as the university recognises them,” she said.

Darbari, who is an assistant professor at the department of mathematics at LSR, said that if one looks at the mathematics and statistics departments of her college, the research publications will surpass those of their counterparts from other colleges. 

“My department has approximately 60 to 70 publications. On average, a faculty has 8 to 10 publications. So, if you have more science teachers, you have more publications,” she said.

A senior faculty at SRCC, who requested anonymity, echoed Darbar’s views. 

“A research paper in sciences can have over 5,000 people as authors but it does not work like that in social sciences. Besides, the faculties of our college are primarily known for writing books. The most used and famous commerce textbooks across the country are written by SRCC faculties but they are not counted in NIRF,” the faculty said.

SRCC is a premier commerce college and it does not offer any science course. 

Experts also said that publishing research from non-science disciplines is comparatively difficult. 

“In science disciplines, you go to the lab, do an experiment. If you are not an experimentalist, if you are a guy who works with computers, you go to computers, you know certain equations, you basically solve a complex problem using computers,” Rajnish Kumar, chairperson, rankings committee at IIT Madras, told ThePrint.

“And once a problem has been solved, you can send it out for computation, whether it’s done through experiments or through computational methods,” he added.

Kumar went on to say, “In arts and humanities, it’s not that simple. You need to basically identify the right topic, and then identify the right set of students who would be willing to go to the field to generate the data. 

“It takes more time for them to basically collect the right amount of data, which will be giving you a statistically significant outcome once you do the analysis, and unless and until you do all these, it can’t be published in a good quality journal.”

He also said that while he does not know how NIRF compares science and non-science institutes, global rankings give benefit if you publish research in areas which traditionally get less citations. “For example, the QS world rankings consider one citation from humanities roughly equivalent to 10 citations from an engineering or science course. They normalise the citations.”

DU faculty’s concerns about process 

Some faculty members, in fact, raised concerns about the existing ranking process. 

N.P. Ashley, an assistant professor at the department of English at St. Stephen’s College, told ThePrint that the major problem with the Indian higher education evaluation scheme is that it does not think that teaching is most important fundamentally. 

“If undergraduate faculty members spend so much time publishing research papers, who will do the teaching? Who will mentor students?” he questioned. 

“Thanks to these processes, teachers are made to become clerks obsessed with documentation and making reports. A ranking system that doesn’t take into account the quality of classroom conversations is pointless and counterproductive”, he said.

“The quantitative aspects of parameters will invariably help colleges with more number of students, and going against students with smaller numbers is another matter to reckon with,” he added.

The faculties also questioned evaluating colleges with different strengths on the same parameters. “We had, in the past, raised the issue to the NIRF but these are policy matters and they are to be changed at the policy level,” Darbari said.

What worked for Hindu & ARSD

Although both Hindu College and ARSD College have a large number of science courses, they have made conscious efforts to increase research output over the years.

Hindu College principal Anju Srivastava told ThePrint that the college started focusing on research and skill training much before the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 came into effect. 

“Overnight aptitude for research cannot be developed among students. We made conscious efforts to give exposure to students at the undergraduate level. We have a special dedicated centre for research which we started in 2021-22. Our efforts matched very well with the recommissions of NEP 2020,” Srivastava said.

“Our research centre was established to give an atmosphere to engage in work beyond the curriculum, especially in science fields. We also organised our own resources for an in-house Hindu College project which we called an interdisciplinary research project. Over the years, it has been slowly and steadily built up. Therefore, we have been able to steadily grow. Teachers have been engaged in research as after NEP, teachers have to be involved in things other than classroom work,” she said.

Both students and faculty at the college are engaged in research work in the fields of environment, machine learning, combinatorics and number theory.

Gyantosh Kumar Jha, principal of ARSD college, told ThePrint that the college has made consistent efforts to increase research output over the years. This includes an in-house programme in which they train students how to write research papers, and students from across disciplines participate in that.

“We have launched ‘Prabodh scheme’ for interdisciplinary research under which students and teachers work in collaboration on various research projects. We also give some stipend to students to participate in those to encourage them. We have also started a research excellence award for faculty to motivate them to engage in research work,” he said.

The college is working in diverse fields including nanopolymers, microcontroller, manganite-ferrite, education and health, among others.

(Edited by Radifah Kabir)