Year: 2014

Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), an inter planetary mission to planet Mars, has become a huge success with the satellite entering the designated MARS orbit, a few days back. Indian Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi himself witnessed the final orbital maneuvers and congratulated the ISRO and other scientists and engineers who contributed to the successful launch.

Indeed, the MOM experiment is a giant step forward for India. It is notable that India achieved the success on its first attempt itself whereas more advanced countries like, USA took several attempts before realizing the dream. It is widely acknowledged that the mission is very complex in nature, and it took about an year to achieve the feat.

The brief time table for the mission is given below:

It has been configured to carry out observation of physical features of mars and carry out limited study of Martian atmosphere with following five payloads:

• Mars Colour Camera (MCC)
• Thermal Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (TIS)
• Methane Sensor for Mars (MSM)
• Mars Exospheric Neutral Composition Analyser (MENCA)
• Lyman Alpha Photometer (LAP)

Various dimensions of the rocket used for the mission are as given below:

aa
image courtesy:
http://swapsushias.blogspot.in/2013/11/things-you-must-know-about-isro-mars.html#.VCgpsFJoFxA

Timeline:

Now that the top ranked universities list has been published by QS, not surprisingly, the list doesn’t include any Indian universities, a country where the world’s first known university was established (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda) . The criteria for selecting world’s top universities is as given below:

1. Academic Excellence – Based on global survey of academics; Weightage: 40%
2. Employer Reputation – Based on global survey of graduate employers;.   10%
3. Faculty/Student Ratio – 20%
4. Citations per Faculty – An indication of research impact 20%
5. International Student Ratio – Measures international diversity of students, 5%
6. International Staff Ratio – Measures international diversity of faculty, 5%

None of the Indian universities are in the top 200, which surprises many people who are aware that IIT’s (Short for Indian Institute of Technology) are among world’s best institutes. The IIT entrance exam is conducted in 2 stages. 1. JEE MAIN, 2. JEE Advanced (JEE stands for Joint Entrance Exam). For 2013, the number of candidates appeared for JEE MAIN stands at around 1.5 million as against an intake of about 10,000 by all IITs in India. Successful candidates, may appear for IIT Advanced. The number of students who appeared for IIT Advanced in the year 2012 stands at 506,000. That is one student is selected out of 50, just to get entry in an IIT, irrespective of the branch of study. Apart for IITs, there are other primier institutes like NIT (National Institutes of Technology) and BITS (Birla Institute of Technology), and others.

The very fact that none of these institutes appear in top 200, one wonders if there is any improvements that need to be done.  It may be necessary to include the following in selecting the best universities:

1. Competition that a student has to face to get selected (total number of students applied to the number of seats available)

2. Competition that a faculty member has to undergo for getting selected (number of applications received for a faculty position).

3.  The international staff ratio may be waived for universities in India because being a populous country, lot of talent exists withing the country.

4. Number of entrepreneurs created over the past 10 years or so on a rolling average basis.

On the other hand just see the stats released by PitchBook Data, a US-based private equity and venture capital research firm.  Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are ranked fourth on a list of 50 best entrepreneurial undergraduate institutes in the worl

http://www.financialexpress.com/news/iits-among-worlds-5-best-entrepreneurial-undergraduate-institutes-smriti-irani/1290813

Indian look forward to a more inclusive stats during the years to come.

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/ng-interactive/2014/sep/16/-sp-qs-world-university-rankings-2014