India’s Premier Private Engineering & Technology Universities 2024-25

Attaining the $30 trillion GDP dream by 2047 necessitates private engineering and technology universities skilling an army of managers and workers in STEM subjects If the lofty Viksit Bharat (‘developed India’) with a $30 trillion GDP dream of Prime Minister Narendra Modi — who seems set to serve a third consecutive term in office after results of General Election 2024 are announced on June 4 — is to be realised, India’s manufacturing sector which currently contributes a mere 17 percent of GDP, has to at the very least double its contribution. Although most economists and pundits believe this requires heavy investment in infrastructure, plant and machinery, it also necessitates skilling an army of managers and workers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects. In turn, this requires upgrading and developing excellent engineering colleges and universities equipped with best faculty, latest technologies and laboratories and well-furbished libraries. During the past 75 years after India wrested independence from foreign rule, the country’s omniscient central planners provided for substantial investment in steel, coal, fertiliser, cement, pharmaceutical and other core industries, but did not develop sufficient human resources to efficiently manage giant corporations which were promoted by government under socialist ideology. Consequently public sector enterprises (PSEs), which were budgeted to transform independent India into a manufacturing powerhouse, were dominated by bureaucrats and clerks who quickly drove them into bankruptcy and/or heavy dependence upon annual allocations from the Central and state government budgets. Admittedly, India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru who was enamoured with Soviet socialism and government controlled centrally planned economy, promoted India’s famous IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) in Kharagpur, Bombay and Delhi which have since multiplied into 23 institutions. But because of the slow growth of the economy (3.5 percent per year) for over four decades, 50 percent of IIT graduates trained at great public expense, migrated overseas every year and those who remained were stuck in technical jobs without the freedom to expand PSEs into large-scale globally competitive corporations. Moreover given the small number of IITs, even to this day they admit a mere 2 percent of the 1.2 million engineering aspirants who write the annual IIT-JEE (joint entrance examination ) and produce a mere 10,000 graduates per year. With the vast majority of engineering and technology aspirants obliged to sign up with private engineering colleges — 70 percent of all engineering and technology higher education institutions are privately promoted — and IITs routinely topping the league tables published by the media and government, a decade ago, your editors resolved to eliminate IITs from the annual EducationWorld India Higher Education Rankings and rank the country’s most admired Top 100 private engineering and technology universities. Since then, we have been ranking private undergrad colleges and private universities separately, even though some private engineering colleges awarded deemed university status are listed in both league tables. In EWIHER 2024-25, the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS)-Pilani has retained its #1 rank as the country’s pre-eminent private engineering university for the third year…