The Degree That Disappeared from India’s Rankings
What happens when a discipline is so interdisciplinary that it vanishes from our imagination?
Last week, I received the latest double issue of The Week. Like millions of readers, I eagerly turned to its annual rankings of India’s best colleges. Engineering. Medicine. Law. Business. Fashion. Hotel Management. Dentistry. Journalism. Architecture. Design. Virtually every discipline seemed represented.
Out of curiosity, I looked for my alma mater.
I graduated from Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, in the late 1970s with a B.Sc. (Hons.) in Animal Sciences. It was one of India’s finest agricultural institutions, established during the Green Revolution, and it produced generations of scientists, administrators, entrepreneurs and policy makers who helped shape India’s food security.
But there was no category where my college belonged.
Not because it had fallen in standards.
Because the category itself had disappeared.
That prompted me to pull out my nearly fifty-year-old academic transcript. Reproduced below.
As I read through it, I realized something remarkable – not about the university, but about the education it offered.
My degree was called Agriculture Hons in Animal Sciences.
Yet the subjects I studied included:
- Veterinary Medicine
- Animal Physiology
- Nutrition
- Genetics
- Biochemistry
- Microbiology
- Botany
- Crop Production
- Plant Breeding
- Soil Science
- Agricultural Ecology
- Water Management
- Agricultural Economics
- Farm Management
- Rural Sociology
- Statistics
- Mathematics
- Physics
- Food Science
- Dairy Technology
- English
- Punjabi
- Extension Education
- Agricultural Engineering
- Field Training
Pause for a moment.
Today these subjects belong to different schools, departments and, in many universities, entirely different campuses.
In today’s world, I would probably have needed admissions into five or six different colleges to receive the same intellectual exposure.
Yet, in the 1970s, all of this formed one coherent education.
We Have Become Masters of Specialisation
The modern university celebrates specialists.
We rank engineering colleges.
We rank medical colleges.
We rank business schools.
We rank law schools.
We rank fashion schools.
But who ranks institutions that deliberately teach students to think across biology, medicine, engineering, ecology, economics, statistics and society?
Increasingly, nobody.
And that is worrying.
The Problems We Face Refuse to Stay Inside Departments
Climate change is not an environmental problem alone.
It is an agricultural problem.
A public health problem.
An engineering problem.
An economic problem.
A behavioural science problem.
An AI problem.
Food security is not just about crops.
It is about soil microbiology, logistics, nutrition, genetics, climate, markets, public policy and consumer behaviour.
Pandemics are not merely medical events.
They involve veterinarians, ecologists, statisticians, behavioural scientists, economists and communication experts.
Yet our educational ecosystem – and even our rankings – continue to slice knowledge into increasingly narrower compartments.
What We Choose to Rank Shapes What We Choose to Value
College rankings influence students.
They influence parents.
They influence donors.
They influence policymakers.
They influence careers.
When rankings ignore interdisciplinary education, they silently tell society that such education matters less.
That may be the most damaging message of all.
The World Is Moving in the Opposite Direction
Ironically, the technologies that will define the next fifty years demand exactly the kind of education many agricultural universities quietly provided decades ago.
Artificial Intelligence.
Synthetic Biology.
Precision Agriculture.
Climate Adaptation.
Food Systems.
One Health.
Carbon Markets.
Regenerative Agriculture.
These fields do not respect departmental boundaries.
Neither does reality.
The future belongs to people who can connect disciplines – not merely master one of them.
Perhaps Agricultural Universities Were Ahead of Their Time
For decades, agricultural universities have produced graduates comfortable discussing microbes, markets, machinery, meteorology and medicine in the same conversation.
That breadth was never considered glamorous.
Today, it is becoming indispensable.
Maybe the problem is not that agricultural education became irrelevant.
Maybe our definition of relevance became too narrow.
A Challenge for India’s Ranking Agencies
Perhaps it is time for The Week, Hansa Research, NIRF and other ranking bodies to ask a larger question.
Instead of ranking only disciplines, should we also recognise institutions that produce systems thinkers?
Universities where students routinely cross the boundaries of biology, engineering, economics, environment and society.
Institutions preparing graduates for problems that do not arrive neatly labelled.
Because the future will not be built by engineers alone.
Or doctors alone.
Or economists alone.
It will be built by people who understand how all these worlds connect.
Perhaps India’s forgotten agricultural universities have been teaching that lesson for decades.
We simply stopped looking.
What do you think? Have we become so obsessed with specialisation that we’ve overlooked the value of truly interdisciplinary education? I’d love to hear from alumni of agricultural, veterinary, forestry, fisheries, environmental and other multidisciplinary institutions. What did your curriculum prepare you for that conventional rankings fail to recognise?
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