BENGALURU: None of the Indian institutes made it to the top 100 of the QS World University Rankings 2021, released on Wednesday, as they slipped a few notches as compared to last year.
Among the Indian institutes, IIT-Bombay, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, and IIT-Delhi stood at first, second and third places.
The institutes were ranked based on academic reputation, employer reputation, faculty-student ratio, citations per faculty, international faculty and international students.
Indian institutes were strongly impacted by poor scores in international faculty and international student parameters.
For a score of 100, IIT Bombay got a mere 18.2 and 6.9 for the two verticals respectively, while IISc Bengaluru secured 1.4 and 1.6 and IITDelhi 2.3 and 1.5.
Majority of the top 20 institutes saw an overall decline in their global rankings.
Of the 21 Indian institutes that made it to the top 1,000 globally, just three universities showed an improvement in rankings -- IIT Guwahati (global rank 470), OP Jindal Global University (651), and Savitribai Phule Pune University (Global rank 651).
IIT Hyderabad (global rank 601) made its debut on the top 1000 this year. The IISc has been on a downward trend since 2016 (except for 2019 when it ranked 170).
IISc Director Anurag Kumar could not be reached. UGC vice-chairman Bhushan Patwardhan attributed the drop in rankings of Indian institutes to the quality of education and research.
He told TNIE, “We need to focus on quality and relevance over quantity and degrees. Even the central government’s centre of excellence initiative did not salvage the institutes in the ranking. A more detailed study is needed to know what happened to centres of excellence.”