The reportedly good show of India’s higher education institutions (HEIs) in the latest QS World University Rankings (WUR) 2027, published on June 17 by the London-based HEIs rankings agency Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), has precipitated an outpour of self-congratulation. The establishment, including academia, Union education ministry and media, has been quick to trumpet India’s all-time best showing in QS 2027 — 52 HEIs ranked this year against a mere 14 a decade ago; 18 achieving their best-ever ranking; and — most celebrated of all — IIT-Delhi breaking into the global Top 120 at #118 followed by IIT-Mumbai at #134 and IIT-Madras at #170.

Although visibility of Indian HEIs in the QS league tables is encouraging, this is an occasion for introspection rather than celebration. Of the 52 Indian institutions ranked, only three are in the global Top 200 and eight in the 200-500 band. The remaining 41 are clustered in the 500-1,000 band, i.e, 80 percent of India’s ranked universities are in the bottom half of QS WUR 2027.

It is sobering — or should be — that neighbouring China which was educationally backward compared with India in 1949 — has six HEIs ranked in the Top 100 with Peking and Tsinghua universities ranked #13 and #14 respectively. Moreover, several other Asian countries with far smaller populations and resource base have built globally competitive higher education systems. Singapore has two universities ranked in the Top 20 with the National University of Singapore ranked #10. Malaysia, which embarked on its higher education expansion much later than India, has one HEI ranked in the Top 100 with Universiti Malaya ranked #56.

It’s a sad commentary that India’s higher education system with 1,292 universities and 53,000 colleges — some of them of over 150 years vintage — has failed to develop a Top 100 globally competitive HEI. The prime cause is failure to develop an academia-military-industry complex in which academic research translates into defence hardware and commercially viable products. India’s expenditure on R&D as a percentage of GDP is 0.65 percent (cf. China’s 2.4 percent, US’ 3.5 percent and South Korea’s 4.9 percent). Therefore, India’s poor research output and citation impact — given heavy weightages in the QS rankings methodology — is reflected in QS WUR 2027. The consequence is that none of India’s HEIs has produced a global game changer product/service since independence.

Another major cause of laggard status of Indian HEIs is lack of autonomy. India’s higher education system is supervised by an alphabet soup of regulators — UGC, AICTE, NAAC, state governments among other regulatory bodies — which control and supervise everything from curriculum design and faculty recruitment to fee structures and student intake. Contrastingly, the world’s top-ranked universities are characterised by almost complete autonomy in academic, administrative and financial matters.

Less an occasion for celebration, India’s scorecard in QS WUR 2027 highlights the long road its HEIs need to travel to achieve global competitiveness. A nation aspiring to become a developed (Viksit) economy by 2047 cannot be satisfied with three institutions in the Top 200 and dozens languishing in the 500-1,000 band.