It was a session of introspection at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) as alumni quizzed professors on why the institute was not a top-ranked institute globally.

Celebrating Alumni Day on Friday, the 1989 batch wanted to know why the institute was lagging behind other IITs in rankings and sought a performance graph of the departments on campus. Despite the alumni being known for excellence around the world in their chosen field, they could not understand why IITs did not figure in the top 200 list of colleges globally. They got a simple yet straightforward answer — the IITs, particularly IIT-M, believes in nation building.

Explaining the process behind global rankings, David Koilpillai, dean of infrastructure and planning, said the ranking organisations failed to take into consideration various factors, notably the institutes’ contribution to nation-building.

“IIT-M’s participation in the recent GSLV launch and the development of the crew module found no mention in the rankings,” he pointed out. “Also our contribution to DRDO is very important to us as well as nation building. But it is not credited,” he noted.

Reiterating the sentiment, IIT-M Director Bhaskar Ramamurthy said there were commercial interests behind the rankings. Some of the best German and French engineering institutions did not figure in the top-ranking colleges in the world.

The rankings were of help to select universities in the U.S., the U.K., Australia and Singapore, he said. “Eighty per cent of the respondents for a survey about the institution are outside the country. We are developing a ranking system for our country with relevant parameters,” Prof. Ramamurthy said, adding that IITs were managing reasonably well because of the alumni.

Alumnus Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior vice-president of Ads and Commerce at Google, in an interaction with reporters on the sidelines of the meeting also responded in a similar vein, when he said the grounding he got in the institute had helped him when he went to Brown University to pursue a Master’s degree in computer science.