World renowned Science Journal, ‘Nature’ has given top rank to Panjab University (PU), Chandigarh among the leading Science Institutions of India.

In the special issue on ‘Science in India’, ‘Nature India’ identified the leading science institutions by comparing the citation rates in Elsevier’s Scopus database of all Indian institutions, which had produced more than 2,000 papers between years 2010 and 2014.

PU topped the ten ‘Elite Research Centres of India’. PU has been ranking as the top University of the country in the ‘Times Higher Education World University Rankings’ for the last two years. During the current year, PU has placed in the bracket of 276-300 along with Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore.

PU is followed by Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai. Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS), Kolkata; Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), India; Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay; Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore; IIT Guwahati are at third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh places respectively.

CSIR; IIT Kharagpur and IIT Madras remained at eighth, ninth, and tenth place respectively.

PU Vice Chancellor Prof Arun Kumar Grover has congratulated the students, research scholars, alumni, staff and faculty members for yet another international recognition to the PU. He said that the recognition from the top science journal should further motivate the University in further excelling in the field of research and innovation.

PUTA President Prof Rajat Sandhir has credited the entire teaching fraternity and research scholars of the University for the success. He said that the faculty members are committed to put the University in first 200 institutions of the world.

Dean University Instructions Prof AK Bhandari and Dean Research Prof Lalit Bansal have also expressed their joy over the recent feat.

In the news feature, Mr. Richard Van Noorden has noted that India has almost quadrupled its scholarly output since 2000 but that rate is surpassed by Brazil and China. India underperforms relative to its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and population. Its scholarly impact remained low in 2013, which was nearly 30 percent below the world’s average.

With only 200,000 full time researchers (14% of them female) in a population of nearly 1.3 billion, India has ranked below Chile, Kenya and many other countries in terms of the density of its scientific workforce.

India is one of the world’s leading filers of patents but it registers far fewer applications per capita than any other top-filling nation. Multinational firms in India have boosted the country’s rate of filling, Mr. Richard Van Noorden noted. In 2013, India filled 17 domestic and foreign patent applications per one million people which is far less than 4,451 per one million people by South Korea; 3,716 per one million people by Japan; 2,288 per one million people by Germany and 910 per one million people by USA, he further mentioned.

Nature has mentioned that China’s research spending has shot up to almost 2 percent of its GDP but India is languishes at 0.9 percent, which has changed a little in more than a decade.