EWIHER Top 300 Universities 2024-25

To compile the league table of India’s most admired public and private universities, 2,100 respondents, comprising faculty and students in higher education institutions and industry leaders in 22 states countrywide were interviewed, writes Dilip Thakore and Summiya Yasmeen     Although learned professors and academics in their ivory towers seem oblivious and hold themselves blameless, there’s much that’s wrong with post-independence India’s socialist-template higher education system. The poor condition of the Indian economy — GDP $4 trillion (cf. USA’s $23 trillion and China’s $17 trillion); 40 million ‘educated’ unemployed; low factory and farm productivity, rock-bottom per capita income of $2,064 (cf. USA’s $76,000 and China’s $12,720) — is intimately connected with the country’s moribund higher education system. News of any earth-shattering or game-changing invention (the internet, smartphone, electric car, green energy etc) emerging from the shady bowers of Indian academia is rare if not non-existent. Yet taxpayers make heavy annual contributions to sustain India’s sputtering public higher education institutions. In the Union budget 2024-25, an allocation of Rs.47,619 crore has been made for public higher education. The poor condition of India’s universities is reflected in the annual global ranking league tables of the highly reputed London-based academia ranking agencies Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and Times Higher Education (THE). In the QS World Rankings 2024 which evaluates 1,559 universities across 104 countries, only two of India’s 1,168 universities — IIT-Bombay at #149 and IIT-Delhi #197 — are ranked among the global Top 200. The much trumpeted Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (IISc, estb.1908) is ranked #225. In the THE World University Rankings (WUR) 2024 which assessed 1,906 universities in 108 countries, Indian universities have fared worse. India’s top-ranked university is the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, ranked in the 201-250 band, followed by Anna University, Chennai (501-600) and IIT-Guwahati (601-800). None of India’s pioneer metropolitan universities in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras established in 1857 are ranked among the global Top 200 by either agency. It’s noteworthy that all the above are public — established by government — universities. Private universities haven’t fared better. BITS-Pilani (estb.1964), routinely ranked India’s #1 private engineering university by EducationWorld, is ranked in the 801-1000 band by THE. Perhaps the new crop of private universities established in the new millennium are too young to merit respectable global rankings. The new genre O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat (JGU, estb.2009) “made history” when it was ranked among the global 750 by QS in 2022 and deductively, India’s #1 private university. But it is ranked in the 951-1000 band in QS World University Rankings 2024. The poor rankings of India’s most admired universities in respected international academic league tables is made more painful by the high rankings of Asia’s best universities, and mainland China in particular. Five Chinese universities (Tsinghua, Peking, Fudan, Shanghai Jiao Tong and Zhejiang) are ranked among the QS Top 100 and another three within the Top 200. Moreover, several other Asian universities are ranked well above IIT-Bombay, top-ranked by QS (#149) and IISc (201-250) by THE. Among…