In the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Ranking (WUR) released on June 8, the same three universities–The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay and IIT Delhi–were able to find a place in the top 200, for the fifth consecutive year.
The London-based QS ranks the world institutions and universities annually on six indicators – academic reputation (AR), employer reputation (ER), citations per faculty (CPF), faculty/student ratio, international faculty ratio and international student ratio.
IIT Bombay remained India’s top ranked institute for the fourth consecutive year, while ranking 117th worldwide. IIT Delhi became India’s second-best institution, by improving its position from 193rd to 185 since last year. The IISc Bengaluru ranked number 1 in the world for research, by getting a perfect score of 100 out of 100 for the citations per faculty (CPF) metric.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and union education minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank lauded the three institutions for their achievement. PM Modi said efforts are under way to ensure more universities to scale global excellence.
The education minister pointed out that India is taking a leap in the field of education and research, and is emerging as a ‘VISHVAGURU’.
22 Indian universities featured in the top 1000 WUR. Out of this, four of them achieved this feat for the first time. These were Jawaharlal Nehru University (561-570), Pondicherry University (801-1,000), IIT Bhubaneswar (701-750) and Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan (801-1,000).
Meanwhile, Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), Banaras Hindu University (BHU) and Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham dropped from the top 1,000 list and are now placed between 1,001 and 1,200.
Indian universities have improved their research impact and academic reputation. Seventeen of India’s 35 universities in the list have improved their CPF metric, while only 12 dropped. Also, 20 of the 35 made consistent progress in their academic reputation as against only 9 recording a fall.
However, Indian universities continue to struggle on the teaching-capacity metric with none of them making it to the top 250 for faculty-student ratio category.
Worldwide, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology topped the list for the tenth consecutive time. While the University of Oxford came second, Stanford University and the University of Cambridge shared the third spot.