In another first, IIT-Delhi has replaced IISc as the best ranked Indian institution in the world. In another first, IIT-Delhi has replaced IISc as the best ranked Indian institution in the world.

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Bombay has broken into the top 200 club in the latest edition of the ‘Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings’, to join IIT-Delhi and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, in this group. With this, India, for the first time, is home to three of the top 200 universities in the world.

According to the ‘QS World University Rankings 2018’, released on Wednesday morning, IIT-Bombay improved its performance by 40 positions, from 219 rank last year to 179 this time. In another first, IIT-Delhi has replaced IISc as the best ranked Indian institution in the world. So, while IIT-Delhi has risen from 185 rank to 172 this year, IISc slipped over 30 places from 152 to 190.

The rise of IIT-Delhi and IIT-Bombay is significant as Indian educational institutions had lost ground in the QS rankings last year. But IISc’s performance could be a cause for concern as the institution, which dropped out of the top 150 club in the 2017 rankings, has slipped even further instead of recovering lost ground.

However, IISc is rated the sixth best institution in the world in terms of QS’s ‘citations per faculty’ metric. “This metric measures the research intensiveness and research impact of a university by dividing the number of citations that a university’s research acquires by the number of faculty members at that university. QS notes that IISc’s research papers were cited nearly 82,000 times over the five-year period QS used for this metric,” states the QS press release.

The HRD Ministry is currently working on a framework to encourage educational institutions to break into the top 100 club of any of the reputed world ranking metric.

The ranking table this year has provided a list of the world’s 959 top universities, which includes 20 Indian institutions — six more than last year. Jadavpur University (ranked in the 601-650 band), University of Hyderabad (601-650), Anna University (651-700), Manipal University (701-750), Aligarh Muslim University (800-1000) and Birla Institute of Technology and Science (800-1000) are the six new entrants.

Delhi University, for the first time, entered the top 500 group, moving up from the 501-550 category to the 481-490 category. IIT-Kharagpur improved its rank from 313 to 308, and IIT-Kanpur rose from 302 to 293 rank. IIT-Madras, however, lost a few places and moved from 249 to 264 rank. IIT-Guwahati moved from 481-490 band to 501-550 band. Banaras Hindu University, Panjab University, University of Mumbai and University of Pune are all ranked in the 801-1000 band.

“India is progressing in our global rankings. Five Indian universities feature among the global 100 for research indicator. However, there is still plenty of room for improvement, especially in the ‘employers reputation’ indicator, suggesting that a closer collaboration between the corporate world and the leading universities is essential. India is also less competitive than other countries in the international students and faculty indicators, which makes perfect sense given the huge internal demand for higher education,” Ben Sowter, Research Director at QS, has been quoted as saying.

In the overall rankings, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) continues its run as the world’s best university for the sixth consecutive year. Stanford University and Harvard University follow as the world’s second and third best institutions.

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