According to feedback received from our marketing personnel, the general perception is that EducationWorld is a K-12 education focused publication. This perception is inaccurate because over the past 13 years since this monthly sailed into the stagnant waters of Indian education, we have been providing comprehensive coverage of India’s rapidly obsolescing education system from KG-Ph D. Contrary to popular belief, we have featured in-depth SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) stories on colleges, universities and other institutions of higher education countrywide. Among them: Indian Institute of Science, IITs, IIMs, Delhi, Mumbai and Amity universities and the Manipal Education and Medical Group. Moreover, we have been lightning quick to protest attempts by the BJP-led NDA and Congress-led UPA governments to dilute the autonomy of the IITs and IIMs. Yet perhaps because of the annual EducationWorld schools (September) and preschools (January) rankings and related celebratory events which receive wide publicity, the popular impression is this is essentially a K-12 centred publication. Therefore to remove this unwarranted impression from the public mind, in the run-up to the new academic year and at a time when millions of higher secondary school-leavers are looking for admission into suitable engineering and technology institutes, we called in the Delhi-based Centre for Forecasting and Research Pvt. Ltd ( C fore) — our trusted market research agency which conducts our annual schools and preschools rankings — to do the field research for our inaugural rating and rankings of India’s Top 100 non-IIT engineering colleges. We decided to leave out India’s globally-famous IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) from this survey because the seven vintage and nine newly promoted IITs together admit only 2 percent (10,000) of the 500,000 engineering college aspirants who write the IIT main joint entrance examination. Therefore for the vast majority of science and maths stream higher secondary school-leavers, admission into them is a distant dream. Anyway, they routinely top the rankings of sundry publications which rank engineering colleges. This inaugural EW-C fore India’s Most Admired non-IIT Engineering Colleges Rankings 2013 provides valuable information about technology education institutions countrywide which have been soldiering on in the shadow of the pampered and highly-subsidised IITs. It’s inspiring to learn that the Top 100 ‘other’ engineering colleges are making determined efforts to close the teaching-learning and research gap which separates them from the IITs. Therefore students who don’t make the cut in IIT-JEE shouldn’t worry too much. There are numerous almost as good options available to them within the huge community of 3,400 engineering colleges of India. Now that we have initiated the ratings and rankings of institutions of higher education, we have gone the whole hog in this issue. Also included are league tables ranking the Top 30 of the country’s 355 medical colleges. True, other publications also offer league tables ranking engineering and medical colleges. But if you take the trouble to read our contextual and explanatory commentaries which interpret the league tables, you will appreciate that there’s a world of difference between the narratives of this specialist education publication and…
