The annual EW rankings deliberately exclude IITs and NITs from our league tables to enable 98 percent of students who don’t make it into these routinely top-ranked government institutes to choose the most suitable among India’s 3,415 private engineering colleges, writes Summiya Yasmeen Introduced in 2013, the annual EducationWorld pan-India engineering college rankings league tables are sui generis and differentiated from the ranking of other magazines and dailies including pink papers. Although initially for two years, the EW league tables included and ranked the Central-government promoted Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and National Institutes of Technology (NITs), in 2016 we excluded these highly-subsidised institutions because they routinely topped all league tables and also because they admit a mere 2 percent of the 1.3 million class XII graduates who write the annual IIT/NIT Joint Entrance Exam. Instead, the annual EW survey opted to rate and rank the country’s private engineering colleges to enable 98 percent of students who don’t make it into the IITs/NITs to choose the most suitable among India’s 3,415 non-government engineering colleges, some of whom are closing the IITs/NITs versus the rest gap. To compile the EW India Private Engineering Institutes Rankings (EWIPEIR) 2022-23, the Delhi-based Centre for Forecasting and Research Pvt. Ltd (C fore, estb.2000), which also conducts our pioneer annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (estb.2007) and EW India Preschool Rankings (2010), interviewed 2,893 sample respondents including 1,136 engineering colleges faculty, 1,288 final year students and 469 industry representatives countrywide. These sample respondents were persuaded to rate engineering institutes/colleges (of whom they had sufficient knowledge) on nine parameters of excellence — faculty competence, placement, research and innovation, industry interface, value for money, infrastructure, faculty welfare, leadership and governance, and curriculum and pedagogy (digital readiness). Digital readiness rating was introduced last year to assess engineering colleges’ transition to the online digital medium during the pandemic education lockdown. The scores awarded by respondents under each parameter were totaled to rank the country’s Top 100 private engineering colleges/institutes inter se. Low-profile institutions assessed by less than 25 respondents are not ranked. The 2022-23 league table of India’s best private engineering institutes has undergone a makeover. Ranked #1 for three consecutive years (2019-21), the high-profile Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani (conferred deemed university status under s.3 of the UGC Act, 1956 in 1964) has ceded top rank in 2022-23 to the low-profile International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H) and Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), jointly ranked #1. BITS-Pilani is ranked #2 followed by Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information & Communication Technology, Gandhinagar at #3, PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore at #4 and Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology, Patiala at #5 — all of whom have retained their last year’s rankings.
