The Law Faculty of Banaras Hindu University was graded 19th position in the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) for the year 2020, based on the data which is provided to the National Board of Accreditation (NBA) earlier in this year.
However, the university informed The Print that, “it does not have any such data as it does not collect student’s data in the first place.”
The NIRF is a mode that is adopted by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, to rank the institutions of higher education in India. The Indian rankings which were released on June 11, 2020, rely on the data that the institutions have submitted to the NBA (National Board of Accreditation), which comes under the Ministry of Education and is the ranking agency for the NIRF.
According to the data, shared by law faculty of BHU with the NBA, 60 students were studying in the five-year program of BA LLB who graduated in the minimum required time in the academic year of 2018-19. They also claimed that 35 students have been placed with an average salary of Rs 8 lakh per annum. This data is in the public territory and can be read on the Ministry of Education web portal.
However, when The Print sought details of the placements through an application filed under the Right To Information Act, “the law faculty said it does not collect such information.”
The RTI petition was filed on June 20, after several students accused the department of manipulating the data.
There is no such data- As said by the Law faculty of BHU:
As mentioned in The Print’s RTI application, it had three questions, “the list of the BA LLB students who obtained campus placements; a list of the organizations where they got placed into, and the approximate salary offered by these organizations.”
In response to the question on the list of students, the BHU replied, “The B.A. L.L.B. Honours five-year degree course is a professional course whose purpose is to educate students so as they could either join the bar as a lawyer or the bench as a judge. As per the practice followed by this institution and other law colleges affiliated to various central universities, joining the legal profession as a lawyer is also considered as deemed placement.” Responding to the second question, on the organizations that recruited students, BHU said, “No such kind of record is prepared and kept by the faculty of law BHU.” On the question of estimated salaries offered to those who secured placements, BHU said, “There is no limit to earning to those joining the bar. Those who join the bench get salary as per government rules.”
After all the responses, The Print had sent few emails to the Ministry of Education (through the Press Information Bureau) and the authorities at BHU seeking an explanation for the contradictory information on 4 August.
Later, The Print’s sent an email to BHU which addressed to Vice-Chancellor Rakesh Bhatnagar and Law Faculty Dean R.P. Rai, but the response came from Dr. Bhartendu K. Singh, a professor in the physics department, he said “We need to check the data from the Faculty of Law. I am requesting Dean, Faculty of Law, to respond to your concern at the earliest with a ‘cc’ to us,” on 10 August.
The Print has also marked in an email sent to the law faculty by BHU’s Internal Quality Assurance Cell Vice-Chairman A. Vaishampayan on the same day. However, the Law Faculty Dean, R.P. Rai yet to respond to both mails.
The NIRF and it’s ranking:
The Law faculty of BHU is ranked 19th among the 20 colleges on the list of NIRF.
The NIRF has been approved by the Human Resource Development ministry on 29 September 2015. The aim behind it was to develop an Indian assessment system on the parameters with QS and Times Higher Education Ranking. The NIRF ranks institutions in 10 groups. BHU, for example, has finished third in the overall category.
An NBA official, who spoke to The Print said that, “Number of participants in the NIRF in 2020 has been more than 5,800. Collecting the original documents from all of them and verifying it is not possible. We expect the participants to be honest and believe that the competitors will check each other’s data.” The official also added that “when there is any doubt on any institution’s details, original documents are asked and the data is verified. Even then, if some dissimilarity is found, the institution will first be warned and then taken off the ranking list.”