Flying high: Agriculture varsity climbs 15 spots in world ranking

Faisalabad’s institution 72nd in agricultural sciences in NTU list

FAISALABAD: The University of Agriculture Faisalabad (UAF) has been ranked the 72nd best university in the world for agricultural sciences, climbing 15 places on the ratings issued by the National Taiwan University (NTU) every year.

The latest rankings will be announced on October 10 (tomorrow) but the NTU has sent out an email to UAF Vice-Chancellor Dr Iqrar Ahmad, informing him that the varsity has jumped 15 points from 87th last year to 72nd in 2016.

The performance ranking of scientific papers for world universities is announced and released by the NTU every year since 2007 in six fields and 14 subjects. The NTU ranking system serves as an objective and informative benchmarking tool for research universities in transitional and newly developed countries in assessing the achievement of science research.

This ranking system is based exclusively on the qualitative and quantitative performance of scientific papers. It does not assess the overall university performance in teaching, research, and administration. It also de-emphasises performance indices used in other ranking systems that represent subjectively perceived reputations and extraordinary achievements.

Dr Iqrar has congratulated the faculty and administrative staff for taking keen interest in the field of research and development and vowed to bring the institution among the top 50 universities of the world in agricultural sciences.

Apart from UAF, he said, no other university in the country has achieved such a distinction of making it to even the top 100 universities in any subject category. “We are moving towards excellence in higher education. We need to be up for more challenges,” he said while talking with the faculty deans.

He expressed satisfaction over the ongoing admissions of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes and appreciated the efforts of the admissions directorate and other officials. He instructed the graduate studies director to encourage candidates to apply online as it will help the varsity generate electronic registration numbers.

Speaking about the Pak-US knowledge corridor, he said under the programme around 10,000 scholars have been sent to the United States in one decade.

Under the Chief Minister Overseas PhD programme, the UAF management has been successful in bringing about a model of sending PhD students in different countries after getting fee waiver from the host institutions.

Dr Iqrar directed the faculty members to upload learning material on management system at least one day prior to the class as it will help students to be mentally prepared for the lecture.

Talking about the government’s agriculture policy, he urged the faculty members to write special chapters on water, fertiliser, energy, artificial insemination, vaccines, environment and food safety.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 9^th, 2016.