He said that the Planning Commission and the Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) "motivated us to fill up the data".

"Our own people were reluctant to fill up the data. The credit is to the central government for goading all (universities and institutes) to fill up the data," he said.

Promising to "adopt the work culture of the Top-100 universities in the world", Grover said that the effort would now be research focused. In the THE (Times Higher Education) parameters for rankings, PU scored 84.7 percent in citations while its score in research was a low 14 percent.

"We want to change that. We want to focus on research. We want to begin a pre-PhD programme. We don't have the full faculty strength. The faculty is forced to take more lectures due to teaching load. Research needs a lot of time. You cannot be giving three lectures a day and then expected to carry out research activities also," he said.

Grover said that students enrolling for research programmes have no access to grants. "The grants from the centre are limited. Students have to depend on these. Eighty-seven percent of our funds go to salaries. Due to this, we cannot give research fellowships," he said.

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