Indian IITs, IISc Bangalore Rank at Bottom in Asia’s Most Innovative University Rankings

It’s quite surprising for India that Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and IIT Mumbai ranked quite low in Asia’s most innovative university raking list. The reason for this quite a low ranking is these high ranking institutes of technology in India are bunching of their research work with that of comparatively new and smaller IITs.

Reuters 75: Asia’s Most Innovative Universities’ ranking list identifies and shortlists institutes doing considerably well to advance science; innovate new things and help drive the global economy. The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore is the only institute ranking in the list other than IITs.

IITs rank at 72 on the Reuters 75: Asia’s Most Innovative Universities ranking and IISc Bangalore on 73. The world class institutes like IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay may have ranked quite higher had they not been grouped with smaller and newer institutes like IIT Palakkhad and IIT Tirupati.

Among the other top universities, 17 are from Japan and South Korea. Reuters also attributed underperformance to the way some countries organize and manage university systems. Since IITs is a network of twenty-three universities with centralized patent administration making it little difficult, if not impossible, to figure out which institute contributed a particular research. Hence, the poor rankings!

Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST) tops the ranking followed by Japan’s University of Tokyo. Seoul National University follows the list at 3rd rank. The list has 22 Chinese universities which is the highest number from a country. The highest ranked university from China, on 13th on the list, is Tsinghua University which is based in Beijing.       

Consistently falling international ranking is a matter of concern, particularly the fact that none of the IITs figure among top 200 global schools. A dismal teacher-student ratio and a poor representation of foreign students are some of the factors that contribute to the dismal international standings of IITs.

Taking the measures, The IIT Council of India now plans to hold JEE Main in 9 countries across the world for UG and PG level courses, increase the number of foreign students, better the infrastructure and increase the number of students in IITs to one Lakh.