The fact that not a single one of the 693 universities recognised by the Delhi-based University Grants Commission is listed in the Top 200 World University Rankings (WURs) published annually by the London-based rating and ranking agencies Quacquarelli Symonds and Times Higher Education, or even in the listing of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, is a national wound. It’s an indication of how low the academy of superpower-aspirant India has fallen since Nalanda University was established in the 5th century BC, in latter day Bihar. In its time Nalanda was the greatest global institution of higher education with 10,000 students from around the world. India’s top-ranked university in the QS league table 2014-15 is IIT-Bombay (#222) and the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, ranked 276-300 in the THE league table. Against this ten Chinese, ten Korean and four Turkish universities are ranked in the Top 200 WURs of QS and THE.
It’s against this depressing backdrop that your editors commissioned the inaugural EducationWorld India University Rankings 2015 survey, which rates and ranks the country’s Top 200 universities inter se. In a massive undertaking of over four-months duration, 124 field representatives of the highly-reputed Delhi-based market research and opinion polls company Centre for Forecasting and Research Pvt. Ltd (C fore), which has been conducting our annual EducationWorld India School and Preschool ranking surveys for the past several years, interviewed 5,689 sample respondents comprising 2,567 university faculty, 1,835 final year students and 1,287 industry leaders. They were asked to rate over 690 universities on seven parameters of academic excellence.
In consonance with international trends, heavy weightage (300 out of an aggregate 1,000 points) was accorded to research and innovation, and given the sorry condition of India’s funds and academics starved varsities, to the parameters of infrastructure (150) and competence of faculty (150). Moreover, unlike our school and pre-primary league tables which are wholly perceptual — albeit perceptions of well-informed respondents — in this survey, considerable weightage has been given to research papers published and cited in internationally-respected refereed journals.
The outcome of this mammoth exercise is India’s most comprehensive master table, rating and ranking the country’s Top 200 varsities, plus other tables ranking public and private universities separately. Moreover league tables of multidisciplinary, science and technology, law and medical universities and the Top 10 under each of the seven parameters are published separately for the convenience of readers.
Yet the prime objective of this elaborate and painstaking exercise is to generate sentiments of institutional pride and ownership within stakeholders — the first and most important step towards organisational reform.
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