Labouring unsung under the long shadow of the country’s celebrated IITs, India’s next-best engineering institutes have received the overdue attention focused on them by the inaugural EW-C fore Engineering Colleges Rankings 2013 as manna from heaven Euphoria, joy, relief, gratitude and other positive emotions were the reactions of heads and faculty of engineering colleges and technology education institutes when they were informed of the outcome of the EducationWorld-C fore Engineering Colleges Rankings 2013 which excluded Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) from the rating and rankings exercise. This is understandable because for several decades the overwhelming majority of India’s 3,400 engineering colleges, the best of whom provide comparable education, have laboured and flowered unsung under the long shadow of the country’s celebrated IITs. The latter invariably dominate rankings of the country’s most admired institutions of engineering education conducted annually by a host of publications including the pink newspapers, business and popular magazines. The suppressed resentment of promoters, managers and faculty of the country’s next-best institutes of technology education against the seven vintage — even if not nine new — IITs is unsurprising. For one, the IITs are the favoured children of the Central government which has constructed these superbly equipped (by Indian standards) institutions and supports them with lavish annual grants ranging from Rs.100-250 crore. This enables them to keep tuition fees rock-bottom low (Rs.60,000-90,000 per year) which in turn attracts the country’s best and brightest students. Moreover, the IITs are supported by the Central and state governments with generous research assignments and grants with private industry following suit. On the other hand, the country’s self-financed 1,400 private sector institutes who constitute the majority of engineering colleges countrywide, are under constant pressure to keep tuition fees and faculty remuneration comparable and are condemned to receive the crumbs of research funding. And as if to rub salt in their wounds they receive minimal attention in the media. Little wonder that labouring unsung — often in locations far removed from glitzy metros — they have received the overdue attention focused upon them by the first EducationWorld-C fore Engineering Colleges Rankings 2013 as manna from heaven. “BITS, Pilani’s #1 ranking in your survey is very welcome and encouraging news in our golden jubilee year, even though we have been topping the private universities rankings of popular magazines such as India Today and Outlook for the past five years. Although this institute has a low media profile, over the past half-century we have acquired an excellent reputation within Indian industry. In particular our Practice School Programme under which over 2,000 BITS students together with 50 mentor faculty are placed in over 180 companies has enabled this institute, which was awarded deemed university status in 1964, to establish strong and durable links with Indian industry. This makes it easy for our graduates to find excellent placements every year,” says Prof. G. Raghurama, an alumnus of IIT-Madras and Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore who signed up with BITS, Pilani in 1987 and is currently director of this…
