LABORATORY’s NON PRUDENT SPEND AND NIRF SCORES: A STUDY OF SCIENCE COLLEGE OF DU

Abstract

The Ministry of Human Resource Development (presently, Ministry of Education) in the year 2015 brought an initiative to rank institutes across India. National Institute of Ranking Framework (NIRF) dwells on the metrics for ranking namely Teaching, Learning and Resources (TLR), Research and Professional Practice (RPP), Graduation Outcomes (GO), Outreach and Inclusivity (OI) and Perception Ranking (PR). The objective of this research is to see the impact of laboratory spend on controllable NIRF parameters namely, teaching learning, research and graduation outcome. Top 10 Science colleges of the University of Delhi has been taken for analysis in this paper. These ten colleges are drawn from top 20 colleges on all India basis as per NIRF 2020. The data has been taken from MHRD website for a period of 4 years from 2016 to 2019 from NIRF 2017 to NIRF 2020. Spearman’s rank correlation has been deployed to identify the linkage between expenditure on laboratory with TLR, RPP and GO through SPSS. The analysis of the findings brings out that there is no relationship between expenditure on laboratory with TLR, RPP and GO. However, it is good to spend on faculties and students in areas which improve teaching learning process but when compared with other colleges in DU who are spending less on laboratory while having better or equivalent TLR, RPP, GO then prudence in spending needs to be encouraged. Thus, spending in areas which supplement teaching learning process must be promoted but it should be prudent spending. Thus, prudence in spending needs to be encouraged at college level and at NIRF level.