Chennai: India’s top engineering and technological institutions IIT- Bombay, IIT- Madras and IIT-Delhi do not find a place in Asia’s top 10 engineering institutions.
The QS World University Rankings by subject was released on Wednesday. It highlights the world’s top universities in a range of 42 popular subjects from engineering to archaeology.
The rankings were dominated by US universities, with Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) topping the tables in 24 subjects between them. National University of Singapore (NUS) is the top university in Asia in engineering subjects. Other universities, including China’s Tsinghua University, Japan’s Kyoto University and University of Tokyo found place among top ten in the region.
In world ranking, it is found most of IITs and IISc, Bangalore are ranked within 51- 100. In Asia, ranking IITs start from 15 and above. In India, IIT-Bombay tops the list in almost every engineering subject like chemical engineering, civil and structural engineering, computer science and information system.
IIT-M Director Bhaskar Ramamurthi said in the engineering groups, in the overall ranking they include all disciplines like that of humanities and others as a result the rank comes down. “One number doesn’t tell the whole story of where exactly is the institution standing,” he said.
Asia's top 10 institutions list in civil and structural engineering subject. —DC
“In these rankings, they give marks for foreign students and faculties and Nobel Laureates which Indian Universities could not afford right now,” says H.Devaraj, Vice-Chairman, UGC. “We have started a new programme called Global Initiative of Academic Networks (GIAN) to encourage international scientists towards Indian higher education institutions. Universities in US are getting more funds. He pointed out that Indian universities also have social responsibilities which other top universities don’t have.
“Our institutions are not matured enough to participate in international rankings and it is comparing in equals. IITs are producing technically sound students, that’s why they are often getting employment in foreign countries and top universities of the world,” he said.
“MHRD is preparing the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) for ranking Indian universities. The rankings will be released on April 4. This will give the exact picture of Indian institutions for the Indian context,” he added. Former chairman of IIT Kharagpur M.AnandaKrishnan said he doesn’t have faith in QS rankings as they were done for business interests. For QS ranking, researchers garnered opinion of 76,798 academics and 44,426 employers to inform the results, alongside analysis of 28.5 million research papers.
