Institutions of Eminence Scheme

Institutions of Eminence is a scheme of UGC which aims to help 20 (10 public and 10 private) higher education institutions from the country to break into top 500 global rankings in 10 years, and then eventually break into top 100 over time.

• These selected institutions are proposed to have greater autonomy compared to other higher education institutions.
• They will be free to decide their fee for domestic and foreign students and have flexible course duration and structure. The selected institutions will have the liberty to enrol up to 30% foreign students.
• They will be able to recruit up to 25% foreign faculty, while there will be no such limit for selected private institutions.
• They will be exempted from approvals of government or UGC for academic collaborations with foreign institutions, except institutions in MEA and MHA’s list of negative countries.
• The 10 state-run institutions will have an additional benefit — provision of ₹10,000 crore over a period of 10 years, over and above the regular grants.
• There will be no financial assistance to the private institutions.

The institutions eligible to apply include top 50 universities of the National Institute Ranking Framework or those which have secured ranking among top 500 of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, QS University Rankings or Shanghai’s Academic Ranking of World Universities. Further, the private Institutions of Eminence can also come up as Greenfield ventures provided sponsoring organization submits convincing perspective plan for 15 years.

In recent months, the government has set up an Empowered Expert Committee (EEC) to select 20 Institutions of Eminence. This EEC is headed by former Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) N Gopalaswami.