The Central Government executed the scheme - Institutions of Eminence (IOE) in 2017-18 to develop "world's top or world-class" institutions in India, mainly for Indian universities to appear in the top 500 worlds ranking in 10 years and top 100 world rankings ultimately. Following the recommendations of the designated committee of experts, 8 Govt. Institutions - The Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIT Delhi, Banaras Hindu University (BHU), University of Hyderabad, DU, IIT Kharagpur, and 4 private institutions, namely BITS Pilani, Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), Manipal, O P Jindal Global University, Haryana, and Shiv Nadar University, UP were declared as institutions of eminence (IOEs).
Most of the IOEs across the country is of very recent origin. The Union Govt. promised to grant autonomy and funding support of `1,000 crores to each Govt. funded institution over 5 years.
The autonomy granted to public-funded institutions includes fixed fees, offering offline and online courses, recruiting foreign faculty, selection of curriculum, etc.
Public funding and autonomy are crucial in upgrading teaching and research and qualifying among the "world-class" institutions in global university rankings. Compared to the ambitious project of world-class universities in China, the coverage of universities under IOEs is limited to primarily public and private-funded universities that belong to predominantly engineering disciplines.
Among the Govt. Universities, there are notable deletions, such as the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI), University of Calcutta, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Jadavpur University, Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), Bharathiar University, Anna University, etc. who are among the top 20 National Institute Ranking Framework (NIRF) 2022 ranked universities.
Till 31st March 2022, the Ministry of Education had released '24 billion (or $3 billion), where the utilization of funds stayed a little less than 40%, and the release of funds was merely '24 billion as against the promised funding of '80 billion.
It is essential to mention that, in contrast, elite universities in China under different projects received research funding of $25 billion during 2008-10 (Shu et al. 2020). Thus, the present scheme of IOEs suffers from small coverage of universities and limited funding to ensure a world-class status. As far as low budget utilization of all IOEs is concerned, the field-level interactions reveal that there is also little financial autonomy in fund utilization, among other factors. It was noted that the purchase and procurement via the Government e-Marketplace portal are quite challenging. The lowest bidders may not necessarily be world-class.