Acute shortage of staff and paucity of funds have been attributed to the drop in the rank of the National Institute of Technology, Calicut (NIT-C) in the National Institutions Ranking Framework (NIRF).
The NIT-C, which received an overall score of 44.50, was ranked 44th among the engineering colleges in the country in the NIRF of the Union Ministry of Human Resources Development. It had scored 62.26 and was ranked 35th in 2016.
“Poor student-faculty ratio has been the biggest problem plaguing the institute. Almost all departments function on ad hocism,” a professor said.
There are 3,003 students for UG courses, 747 for PG and 470 for Ph.D. Incidentally, the strength of the faculty including a large number of members on contract basis is 249. Of this, 75 are women. “The Union Ministry itself is to be blamed for the pathetic situation. No hiring is being done for the last few years,” he said.
The score of the NIT-C of the parameters covered by NIRF such as teaching, learning and resources was 53.28; research productivity, impact and intellectual property rights and patents 21.15; outreach and inclusivity 73.98; graduation outcome 60.77, and perception 26.25.
Distant poor to NIT-T
The NIT-C is a distant poor in majority of categories when compared to the neighbouring National Institute of Technology Tiruchirappalli (NIT-T), whose all-India rank is 11th the among engineering colleges. In the Web of Science and Scopus (Source of Data) categories, NIT-T has top highly cited papers of 199 and 291 respectively. In the case of NIT-C, it is 48 and 81 respectively.
The NIT-T has 36 publications to its credit in the Indian Citation Index while NIT-C has 27. The amount for sponsored research project of NIT-T for last fiscal was ₹17,12,91,750 while for NIT-C it was ₹2,93,32,056. “Once upon a time, NIT-C had 100% placement. Now companies recruit only the cream of students during the campus selection,” said another professor.
As many as 599 B.Tech students with a median salary of ₹7.10 lakh from NIT-T got placement in 2015-16 while 488 students with a median salary of ₹5 lakh from NIT-C got placement during the corresponding period. The total annual expenditure of NIT-T for 2015-16 was ₹141,00,20,000 while for NIT-C it was₹94,43,04,792.
