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By:

Dr. Kishore Paknikar

29 January 2025 at 8:13:00 pm

Who Really Benefits When Varsities Chase the Numbers?

The Ranking Trap - Part 2 As rankings shape academic reputations and institutional priorities, the pursuit of higher positions risks turning a measure of excellence into an end in itself. AI Generated Image The annual university rankings are announced. Some institutions celebrate, others express disappointment, and many begin examining what they must do to improve their position next year. Publicity departments prepare announcements. Administrators study the indicators. Students and parents...

Who Really Benefits When Varsities Chase the Numbers?

The Ranking Trap - Part 2 As rankings shape academic reputations and institutional priorities, the pursuit of higher positions risks turning a measure of excellence into an end in itself. AI Generated Image The annual university rankings are announced. Some institutions celebrate, others express disappointment, and many begin examining what they must do to improve their position next year. Publicity departments prepare announcements. Administrators study the indicators. Students and parents take notice. Governments, funding agencies and potential collaborators may also pay attention. An entire ecosystem responds to the movement of numbers. In the first article of this series, I argued that rankings provide an incomplete picture of educational and scientific excellence. But that raises an equally interesting question. If their limitations are widely recognised, why have they become so influential and who really benefits? The Ranking Economy For some organisations, rankings and research-performance information are commercial activities. QS publishes international university rankings and offers institutional analysis and advisory services. Elsevier supplies bibliometric databases and research analytics used by universities and research organisations. These are different activities, and providing paid services does not, by itself, establish that a ranking or database is unreliable. The more important question concerns the incentives created when institutions become increasingly dependent on numerical comparisons. As universities attach greater importance to their measured performance, demand grows for analytical tools, consultancy, benchmarking and services that help institutions understand and communicate their achievements. But commercial organisations are hardly the only beneficiaries. Universities gain prestige and publicity. Administrators acquire convenient indicators for demonstrating progress. Governments and funding agencies obtain seemingly straightforward comparisons. Students and parents receive simple guidance through a complicated educational landscape. Even the media benefit. A university's rise or fall in a ranking makes an attractive headline. Rankings survive partly because they provide something genuinely useful: simplicity. They compress enormous amounts of information into numbers that are easy to understand and communicate. While their convenience is real, their apparent completeness is not. Peer Pressure Consider what happens when a university announces that it has moved up ten places. The institution publicises the achievement. Prospective students and collaborators notice. Other universities become anxious about their own positions. Administrators study the ranking criteria more closely. Ranking organisations gain further visibility and influence. The process reinforces itself. Universities treat rankings as important because others pay attention to them. Others pay attention because universities treat them as important. Eventually, participation becomes difficult to avoid, even for institutions that recognise the limitations of the system. The influence of rankings therefore does not come solely from those who prepare them. It comes from the authority that universities, governments, funding agencies and society collectively confer upon them. Three words are frequently used as though they mean the same thing: excellence, recognition and reputation. But they do not. Excellence concerns what a scientist or institution actually achieves. Recognition concerns whether those achievements are noticed and acknowledged. Reputation concerns what others believe about their quality. A scientist may produce outstanding work without attracting much attention. An institution may retain a prestigious reputation even when its performance changes. Another may be improving rapidly while remaining relatively unknown. Reputation can outlive the evidence that originally created it. Recognition, meanwhile, may take years to catch up with emerging excellence. Consider the widely publicised Stanford–Elsevier Top 2 percent Scientists lists. A 2026 study in Scientometrics identified 123 universities across 32 countries referring to these lists in official communications. This does not mean that the scientists were undeserving, or that all universities behave similarly. It illustrates how citation-based recognition has become a source of institutional publicity. A researcher may have spent decades producing valuable work without much public acknowledgement. Appearance in a widely publicised list can suddenly generate congratulatory messages, press releases and social media attention. What changed? The scientist's work did not necessarily change overnight. Its visibility did. Recognition is valuable, but we should not confuse the ease of celebrating an achievement with the significance of the achievement itself. Reputation can be converted into opportunity. A prestigious university may attract talented students, accomplished faculty, philanthropic support, research funding and industrial partnerships. These advantages can strengthen its educational and research performance, helping it maintain or improve its position in subsequent rankings. Meanwhile, another institution may have capable teachers and imaginative researchers but inadequate laboratories, limited funding and little national visibility. Rankings need not have created these inequalities. But they can reinforce advantages that already exist. The cycle is straightforward. Achievement attracts recognition. Recognition builds reputation. Reputation attracts resources. Resources create further opportunities for achievement. Rankings can reinforce the entire process. This becomes particularly important when rankings influence public investment. Should scarce research funds go primarily to institutions with proven records, or should some be directed towards institutions capable of achieving much more if given an opportunity? There is no simple answer. Advanced research requires sophisticated facilities and experienced teams. Ignoring established capability would be irresponsible. But concentrating resources indefinitely among successful institutions could prevent promising new centres from emerging. India's Anusandhan National Research Foundation provides an instructive example through its Partnerships for Accelerated Innovation and Research (PAIR) programme. In its first phase, eligibility to lead research networks as hubs was linked to specified NIRF positions. At the same time, the programme deliberately included less-established institutions as partners to strengthen their research capabilities. This is a constructive attempt to combine established capacity with emerging potential. It illustrates a larger policy challenge: rewarding past achievement and creating future opportunity are different objectives, and they need not always rely on identical criteria. Goodhart’s Law Rankings influence not only how institutions are perceived but also how they behave. A university seeking a higher position studies the indicators, identifies where points can be gained and adjusts its priorities. Some changes may genuinely improve teaching, research or infrastructure. Others may primarily improve its score. This is the danger captured by Goodhart’s law: when a measure becomes a target, it may lose its usefulness as a measure. If publication counts dominate evaluation, researchers may feel pressure to publish more frequently. If citations carry excessive weight, fashionable subjects may become more attractive than difficult questions whose significance is uncertain. If reputation is heavily rewarded, publicity may receive disproportionate attention. These outcomes are not inevitable. Indicators can encourage genuine improvement. The problem arises when success on the indicator becomes more important than the purpose it was intended to represent. Competition can improve performance, but science also depends on cooperation, shared facilities and the exchange of ideas. A system that rewards relative position too heavily may weaken incentives to collaborate. Perhaps the most revealing feature of rankings is that even their apparent winners may lose some freedom. A highly ranked university cannot easily disregard the system because its prestige is partly tied to it. Administrators become anxious about annual movements. Researchers celebrated for appearing on citation lists may feel pressure to remain there. Institutions that recognise the weaknesses of rankings may nevertheless continue celebrating favourable results. Refusing to participate can appear more damaging than accepting a system they do not entirely trust. The ranking trap is therefore not simply a story about commercial interests or academic vanity. It is a system of mutually reinforcing incentives that has become difficult to escape. Rankings contain useful information. The problem is the authority we have allowed them to acquire. We created rankings to recognize excellence. We now risk mistaking success in rankings for excellence itself. (The writer is an ANRF Prime Minister Professor at COEP Technological University, Pune, and former Director of the Agharkar Research Institute, Pune. Views personal.)

India waits to lasso diamantaire Mehul Choksi

Quaid Najmi
Apr 14, 2025
5 min read

Mumbai: India rubbed its hands gleefully as the Belgium Police honoured its request to arrest the absconder diamantaire Mehul Chinubhai Choksi – more than seven years after he, along with his nephew Nirav Deepak Modi - allegedly duped the Punjab National Bank of nearly Rs. 13,800-crores.

 

The scam involving the ‘Mehul Mama-Nirav Bhanja’ erupted in Jan 2018, after the PNB lodged a complaint with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

 

By then the kin, along with many of their family members, winked and slipped out of the country, leaving a rattled India rubbing its palms in disappointment.

 

A political-cum-financial storm raged, embarrassing the Bharatiya Janata Party government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi a year before the Lok Sabha elections.

 

Multiple agencies launched a multi-pronged probe into what became the biggest banking scam in the past quarter century – and almost four times bigger than the stock market-cum-banking fraud the late Big Bull Harshad Mehta had inflicted on the Indian economy 33 years ago (in April 1992) – when it was just opening up.

 

In Belgium

According to official reports, Choksi was living with his Belgium citizen-wife Preeti in Antwerp, a global diamond hub, presumably for the past 18 months on a ‘residency permit’ acquired through questionable means, for medical reasons.

 

Earlier, he shot to the headers (June 2021) while being taken in a wheelchair to a court by the Dominican Republic's Police on charges of sneaking into the small country in the Caribbean Sea, North America.

 

Interestingly, as the Antigua & Barbuda government initiated the process to cancel his citizenship acquired through an investor visa, Choksi had suddenly gone ‘missing’ till he surfaced in the Dominican Republic.

 

The April 2025 action by Belgium followed a request by India’s CBI and the financial frauds specialist Enforcement Directorate (ED) to nab Choksi as the InterPol had revoked his Red Corner Notice in 2023.

 

Mama and Bhanja

‘Mama’ Choksi is the founder-owner of Gitanjali Group while ‘bhanja’ Nirav’s Firestar plus other companies – and the duo, with some PNB officials hand-in-glove – conspired to make a ‘mamu’ of not only PNB, but other banks, as it subsequently tumbled out.

 

After making a quiet exit, Choksi was detected living in the verdant Antigua & Barbuda Isles (West Indies), then attempted entry to the Dominican Republic, was sent back to Antigua & Barbuda and then went to Belgium where he was nabbed on Sunday.

 

Similarly, Modi was found sauntering on the streets of London and nabbed in March 2019. He remains in jail there since India's extradition is still pending.

 

However, India is keeping its fingers crossed that it may finally lay hands on Choksi, bring him to India and face trial in the PNB scam, though it may take time.

 

Born in Mumbai (1959) and educated in Gujarat, Choksi, 66, and wife Preeti have three children.

 

The Rs. 13,800-crore PNB scam

In the modus operandi revealed after India’s second-largest PSU bank PNB admitted it was scammed, Choksi and Modi used fraudulent Letters of Undertaking (LoU) to get overseas credits or loans from Indian banks.

 

The PNB first informed the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) of the fraud and then lodged a criminal complaint with the CBI in Jan. 2018, plus another CBI complaint in Feb, that led to a FIR against Modi and Choksi and their companies.

 

The ED entered the scene to probe the allegations of money-laundering through the LoUs – which they allegedly misused to avail short-term business finances from foreign branches of Indian banks.

 

The probe said that the duo were availing the LoUs from the PNB’s Brady House Branch from March 2011, and over the next six-seven years, managed to get a whopping 1,200-plus LoUs like a breeze with the help of some friendly bankers within.

 

Post-scam, the gold-diamond companies Gitanjali Group and Firestone Group with multiple operations in India and abroad have largely wound up, while some personal assets of the mama-bhanja have been auctioned to recover a part of the dues.

 

ED's plea to declare Choksi fugitive stuck for seven years

Even as absconding diamantaire Mehul Choksi, a key accused in the Punjab National Bank loan fraud case, has been arrested in Belgium, the ED's plea to declare him a fugitive economic offender has been pending before a court in Mumbai for nearly seven years.


Choksi, 65, and his nephew diamantaire Nirav Modi are the prime accused in the Rs 13,000 crore PNB bank loan fraud case. Choksi was arrested in Belgium following an extradition request by Indian probe agencies, official sources said on Monday.


The Enforcement Directorate had filed the application in July 2018, seeking to declare Choksi an FEO and confiscate his assets under provisions of the Fugitive Economic Offenders Act.


However, the matter has witnessed repeated delays owing to a barrage of applications filed by the accused in the PMLA court and the Bombay High Court alleging procedural lapses in the Enforcement Directorate's plea.


"The court is kept busy with frivolous applications, and hearing on our application to declare him (Choksi) an FEO has been adjourned for the past seven years,” an ED officer had said after the hearing was once again deferred this February.


"The court should have continued the hearing and taken a decision on the future course of action once the application was moved," the officer had said.

He had urged the court to take note of the repeated filing of similar applications and to not entertain them.


Choksi's lawyer had informed the court that the accused was undergoing treatment for suspected cancer in Belgium and intended to file an application in connection with his health.


Under the FEO Act, an individual can be declared a Fugitive Economic Offender if a warrant has been issued against him for an offence involving Rs 100 crore or more and he has left India while refusing to return. Once declared an FEO, the person's property can be confiscated by the investigating agency.


Choksi had challenged the ED's application in the Bombay High Court, alleging that the agency "had not followed proper procedure before filing the application and, hence, it stands vitiated".


However, in September 2023, the High Court dismissed his plea, ruling that the ED had adhered to the prescribed format under the FEO Act. It also vacated a stay on the special court's proceedings.


Despite this, the hearing on declaring Choksi FEO could not commence, with Choksi continuing to file applications before the special court through his lawyers.


While most of these pleas have been dismissed, a few remain pending. His latest attempt to stall proceedings through a plea to recall the notice issued on the ED's FEO application was rejected in December 2023.


According to ED officials, Choksi left India under suspicious circumstances in early January 2018.


Shifting stance

Choksi's counsel has argued that the ED kept shifting its stance on the material grounds for declaring him an FEO and that the suspension of his Indian passport made it impossible for him to return for investigation.

The court, however, rejected this argument, stating that the notice was issued based on accurate information and not based on "wrong facts or mistaken assumptions".


ED claimed the accused left the country under suspicious circumstances in the first week of January 2018.


Nirav Modi has already been declared as an FEO by the special court. He has been lodged in jail in London since 2019.

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