Of the total number of 4,500 engineering colleges in India, 3,415 are privately promoted. And among them, a large number have been awarded the status of universities because of their high NAAC ratings and good industry reputation
BITS-Pilani’s Dr. Souvik Bhattacharyya (centre left)
Engineering and technology institutions of higher education hold a special place in the imagination of post-independence India’s several generations. After prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru famously declared dams and factories as the new temples of India, and the Central and state governments began a massive infrastructure construction and public sector corporations promotion programme under Soviet-inspired central planning, there was a rush in the newly liberated middle class to sign up their children for engineering.
As a result a large number of engineering colleges including India’s famous IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) mushroomed across the country. But with the Central government-sponsored IITs and NITs (National Institutes of Technology) admitting a mere 2 percent of the 1.3 million IIT aspirants who write the annual IIT-JEE entrance examination, a multitude of privately promoted engineering colleges have sprung up countrywide, especially in south India.
Indeed of the total number of 4,500 engineering colleges in the country, 3,415 are privately promoted. And among them, a large number have been awarded the status of universities because of their high NAAC ratings and good industry reputation. Since 2015, EducationWorld has been rating and ranking India’s best private universities separately to enable the great majority of school-leavers who don’t make the cut to enter the IITs and NITs to choose the next-best option. We also rank government/public engineering colleges – excluding the heavily-subsidised IITs and NITs because they routinely top the league tables of all media publications and also because as stated above, they admit a very small percentage of school-leavers aspiring for engineering higher education qualifications.
For several years, the Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani, Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology, Patiala and Vellore Institute of Technology (Tamil Nadu) have been highly ranked in the annual EWIHER. This year after classification of private and public universities into separate league tables of multidisciplinary, liberal arts, engineering & technology universities, it’s unsurprising that these institutions are top-ranked in that order in the discrete league table of private engineering universities.
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