For EWIHER 2025-26, 2,100 sample respondents including students, faculty and leaders/senior managers in Indian industry in 22 states countrywide were interviewed to rate and rank India’s best universities on ten parameters of higher education excellence Dilip Thakore and Summiya Yasmeen. 

After EducationWorld was launched in 1999 a new energy and spirit of dynamism has become manifest in India’s 1.4 million schools, 45,000 colleges and 1,168 universities.

For regular readers of this sui generis publication which for the past 25 years since it was promoted with the unexceptional objective of “building the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda,” but has had to suffer prolonged calculated indifference of the establishment, it’s a familiar lament. None of India’s 1,168 universities — some of over 150 years vintage — or specialist higher ed institutions, the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and Soviet-inspired Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) have been able to present the world with a killer, zap-’em product or service.

The railway engine, electricity, motor car, jet airplane engine and revolutionary mind-bending products and services such as the smartphone, the Internet, Google, Metaverse, ChatGPT, and humanoid robots, have all been ideated and incubated in western countries, mainly in research laboratories of America’s great nation-building universities.

Independent India’s universities and higher education institutions where professors draw huge salaries that are several dozen multiples of per capita GDP, and 43 million students avail education at rock-bottom prices, haven’t come good with even one global game-changer product or service in the past 77 years.

This sustained failure apart, a greater tragedy of India’s higher education institutions (HEIs) is that they have failed to invent any transformative goods or services to rectify deep-rooted and worsening problems of the Indian economy — toxic air pollution, polluted rivers, traffic-gridlocked urban habitats, low farm and office productivity. Indeed it’s doubtful whether academics and students in our universities are aware of the unwritten social contract under which they are obliged to devise solutions for these and other endemic problems that make life nasty, brutish and too long for the toiling masses who pay for the employment of academics and learning of millions students enrolled in India’s HEIs.

Admittedly, academics and students in India’s also-ran universities are not entirely to blame for this sorry situation. Its genesis can be traced back to the early years after independence when the Nehru-led Congress party following the inorganic Soviet model divested universities of their research function and transferred this traditional obligation to specialised research organisations such as the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). As a result, the important function of research and knowledge creation was taken away from universities which have been transformed into singular teaching institutions.

Therefore high-calibre faculty interested in research-cum-teaching, have been lured away by universities abroad, especially in the US. Meanwhile since it was established in 1942, CSIR which comprises 37 national labs and 39 outreach centres countrywide, has failed to ideate any global or national groundbreakingproduct or service. It has evolved into a bloated bureaucratic organisation with 3,476 “active scientists” supported by 4,000 technical and other staff. India Inc — which was expected to commission research projects to CSIR — has little faith in it.

In the circumstance, India’s critically important Research & Development (R&D) obligation to generate new knowledge and inspire invention has fallen between two stools. Universities do hardly any R&D work and CSIR has failed to enthuse India Inc about its research and product development capabilities.

Consequently while America’s annual R&D expenditure mainly conducted by its 4,000 universities aggregates to 3.4 percent of its $23 trillion GDP; China’s to 2.6 percent; South Korea’s to 5.2 percent cf. India’s mere 0.6 percent of GDP. Little wonder in the past 77 years since independence, neither CSIR nor the country’s 1,168 universities have been successful in ideating a revolutionary product, service or invention. Despite all the bluff and bluster, India is a distant laggard in the global socio-economic development race with a per capita income of $2,600 cf. America’s $86,000 and China’s $13,600.

Yet all is not gloom and doom. In recent years — and especially after EducationWorld launched in 1999 to accord primacy to education in the national development effort, began demanding accountability and outcomes from mandarins of Shastri Bhavan, Delhi, laidback professoriate in ivory towers and school leaders and teachers countrywide — a new energy and spirit of dynamism has become manifest in India’s 1.4 million schools, 45,000 colleges and 1,168 universities.

A substantial number of private universities equipped with globally benchmarked infrastructure — libraries, laboratories and highly-qualified domestic and expat faculty — have mushroomed countrywide. Moreover, a new spirit of competitive dynamism has been infused in primary-secondary education by the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings introduced in 2007, which has since evolved into the largest schools ranking survey worldwide. And critically, following your editors convening India’s first international early childhood care and education (ECCE) conference in 2010 and introducing the annual EW India Preschool Rankings that very year, ECCE has been formalised and accorded pride of place in the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.

Yet it is incontrovertible that the wealth and advancement of nations is most dependent upon teaching-learning, research and knowledge creation in its institutions of higher learning, and universities in particular. But for historic reasons alluded to above, India’s universities have been insufficiently encouraged, empowered or enabled to generate path-breaking new knowledge. Therefore, they have failed to discharge the implicit social contract between the minority privileged to access higher education and the general population.

That’s why in 2013, your editors introduced the annual EducationWorld India Higher Education Rankings. The purpose of this initiative is to not only enable school and undergrad college-leavers to choose the most aptitudinally suitable universities for higher education, but to also introduce the spirit of healthy competition inter se.

In India, numerous media publications notably India Today, have been rating higher education institutions under several parameters of academic excellence and totaling rating scores to rank colleges and universities in separate categories. Moreover, the Union education ministry’s NIRF (National Institutional Ranking Framework) introduced in 2015, ranks India’s Top 100 colleges and universities. However, we believe that the annual EWIHER surveys are qualitatively superior because of our education focus and better domain knowledge. The NIRF rankings based on self-assessment of participating institutions, lack credibility.

Against this backdrop, for this year’s EWIHER survey, we commissioned the Bangalore-based AZ Research Partners Pvt. Ltd (AZR) to conduct a survey based upon perceptions of knowledgeable individuals countrywide to rate and rank India’s most respected higher education institutions including universities; undergrad Arts, Science and Commerce Colleges; Engineering Colleges, and Business Schools.

For this project, AZR compiled a database of 2,100 sample respondents comprising 1,200 students and 800 faculty currently studying and teaching in higher education institutions plus 100 leaders/senior managers of Indian industry in 22 states (Assam, Andhra, Bihar, Delhi, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, among others) countrywide.

“The distinguishing feature of EWIHER 2025-26 is that the sample respondents for the survey have been carefully selected and it reflects the opinions of people who are well-informed and knowledgeable about Indian higher education. The second feature is that our research personnel have interviewed individual respondents, avoiding the common practice of cluster interviews which tend to be dominated by influencers. Therefore, the quality and authenticity of the responses of our sample respondents are likely to be superior,” says Shubra Misra, promoter-director of AZ Research. An alumna of IIM-Lucknow, Misra is a highly experienced market research and industry professional having served with the pioneer ORG-MARG (now A.C. Nielsen), Blackstone MR (now Synovate) and Tata Global Beverages for an aggregate 25 years before co-promoting AZ Partners two decades ago.

Misra is unfazed by “uninformed criticism” that the size of the sample respondents database in EWIHER 2025-26 is too small for a population of 1.4 billion. She believes that in EW-AZR institutional surveys, which began after EducationWorld parted ways with the Delhi-based Centre for Forecasting & Research (C fore) last year, “heterogeneity ensures that response variance is negligible”. “Although a larger sample size may provide more accurate results when forecasting the outcome of general elections, in other market surveys, larger sample sizes have a declining rate of return and often result in considerable loss for clients,” says Misra.

For conducting the EWIHER 2025-26 survey, 100 AZR personnel interviewed 2,100 selected sample respondents as detailed above over a three-months period and persuaded them to rate HEIs they were aware of on eight-12 parameters of HEI excellence. These parameters include competence of faculty, faculty welfare and development, research & innovation, industry interface, graduate placements, leadership/governance quality, curriculum & pedagogy (digital readiness) etc. The scores awarded by sample respondents under each parameter to every HEI were totaled to rank them in separate categories. “I am confident that the EW league tables accurately reflect the relative merits and quality of the HEIs ranked in EWIHER 2025-26,” says Misra.

Nevertheless, with some media publications brazenly monetising rankings surveys, there is considerable cynicism about institutional rankings. Not a few academia and industry leaders tend to dismiss often painstakingly and diligently conducted surveys as tainted. Indeed when “participation” in some institutional surveys is invited — as in the Union education ministry’s NIRF — several top-ranked private universities (Jindal, Ashoka) don’t accept the invitation apprehending bias against private universities. Therefore in EducationWorld ranking surveys, although we invite hard data information from education institutions, participation is not optional. In exercise of citizens’ fundamental right of freedom of speech and expression in the public interest, your editors rank all sufficiently well-known institutions from pre-primaries to universities whether they like it or not, even at risk of nuisance value vexatious litigation.
“All initiatives to assess and evaluate an institution, service or even a beauty contest, are likely to invite controversy. Therefore, evaluators should follow their larger goal or mission — in this case upgrading and improving the country’s education system — in good faith regardless of criticism. For commercial for-profit organisations, there is an inevitable conflict of interest.

But if ranking surveys are conducted transparently according to well-established norms, they are welcome because they hold a mirror to education institutions providing useful third party advice on ways and means to improve. I certainly accord high importance to fair and objective HEI rankings because they enable institutional upgradation and improvement,” says Dr. C.Raj Kumar, the polymath (alum of Madras, Delhi, Oxford and Harvard universities) and founding vice chancellor of the top-ranked O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat (estb.2009).
In Part I of EWIHER 2025-26, we present comprehensive league tables rating and ranking India’s most admired public and private universities. In the May issue (Part II) we intend to publish league tables rankings the country’s best Arts, Science & Commerce Colleges; Private (IITs & NITs excluded) Engineering Colleges; and Private (IIMs excluded) B-schools.
We recommend these league tables are utilised to shortlist the most aptitudinally suitable HEIs for college and school-leavers. To finalise choice of the most suitable HEI, further investigation is advised.