Context:

• Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IIT-G) has been ranked 470th globally in the QS World University rankings 2021.
• This marks an improvement of 21 places by the institute, which was ranked 491st in the 2020 edition of the QS World University rankings.
• The main reason for this increase is the strong improvement in the ‘Citations per Faculty’ category where IIT Guwahati has improved from 71.2 in 2020 (Global Rank 89th) to 77.9 in 2021 (Global Rank 55th).

What is QS World University rankings?

It is an annual publication of University rankings by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS)- A british company specialising in the analysis of higher education institutions around the world.

Previously, it was called Times Higher Education – QS world University rankings. The name changed since 2010.

It is the only international ranking to have received the approval of International Ranking Expert Group (IREG).

It rates the worlds top 1000 universities.

How are universities ranked?

To rank institutions, QS uses six indicators:

1. Academic reputation.
2. Employer reputation.
3. Faculty/student ratio.
4. Citations per faculty.
5. International faculty ratio.
6. International student ratio.

Top 20 institutions this year:

Performance of Indian Institutions:

1. Top three from India featured in top 200 and their rankings: Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay (172), followed closely by Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore (185), and IIT Delhi (193). However, all three have dropped in their rankings compared to the last year.
2. In total, 21 Indian higher education institutions have found their place among the world’s top 1,000 (It was 24 last year). Of these 21, 14 have fallen in rank over the past 12 months, while four have improved their position.
3. Indian higher education institutions perform strongly in research quality, even though they fail to increase their academic standing, teaching capacity, and levels of internationalisation at the same rate as their global competitors.

Reasons for poor performance of Indian institutions:

Indian institutions got zero score on ratio of international faculty and students. India also scored poorly on faculty- student ratio.

This is because India counts only full-time faculty, whereas American universities include even PhD students who are teaching or research assistants.

What should India do now?

The government has already formed a committee on how we can improve the perception of the premier Indian institutes abroad.

The government should now launch a campaign similar to incredible India to change the perception.