6 IITs, IISc Lose Rankings in QS World University Rankings 2016-17

Considering the dismal scenarios at IITs, NITs, IIMs and other institutes, India is losing rankings at the world level. Contributed by low student-teacher ratio, lack of foreign students, increasing dropout rate, tie-ups of higher institutes with the newly established ones, low number of doctoral students or any other reason, the ranking of top Indian institutes is going down.   

In QS World University Rankings 2022-17, released on September 5, 2022, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is ranked as the world’s best educational institute for the fifth consecutive year. However, the news isn’t that good for the IITs as their rankings dipped this year. India Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru remains India’s top raking institute but it is dropped out of 150 top ranking institutes word over since it slipped to 152 position this time from its 142th rank last year.

The only good news is IIT Madras has made it into the top 250 top raking institutes by climbing five places up this year. Six IITS including Kharagpur, Roorkee, Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur Guwahati also lost their rankings. IIT Bombay slipped to 219th rank against 202 last year, IIT Kharagpur to 313 from 286, IIT Roorkee to 399 from 391, IT Delhi to 185 from 179, IIT Kanpur to 302 from 271 and finally IIT Guwahati to 481-490 band to 451-460 band in 2015-16 ranking.

In the official communiqué released by QS World University Rankings 2022-17, four of the Indian institutes remained among the top 100 for the research impact as is measured by the QS citations per faculty metric. On the other hand, IISc Bangalore is now ranked at the 11th position as a research institution as per the citations per faculty scoring data which is sourced using Elsevier’s Scopus database.

The fall is attributed to, as per Ben Sowter, head of research at QS Intelligence Unit, several factors including relative low number of PhD qualified researchers other than India hiring or attracting fewer PhD qualified researchers from abroad. Also, there remains a lot more to be done on the investment front – capital and human, provided IITs and other Indian Institutes remains competitive and continue moving ahead.