India's Best Engineering Institutes 2019

The role of evaluating engineering institutions or rating becomes crucial in the current circumstance as admission to good institutions gets tough owing to a consistent decline in student intake as well as institutions.

- Nimesh Chandra & B Mahesh Sarma

As per the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the number of engineering institutes in India has gone down from 3,400 in 2014-15 to 3,124 in 2018-19. The intake in B.Tech/BE programme has waned from 1.7 million to 1.4 million seats in the same period. Over the last five years, 158 institutes have closed down, with an annual declining figure of 75,000 seats. The AICTE wants to close down 800 engineering institutes nationally.

The existing colleges have a resolute challenge in sustaining and keeping student interest buzzing. In such conditions most institutions are engaging in activities that nurture the students by providing additional short-term programmes, engaging external consultants to offer training in languages and soft skills, teaching the budding engineers not only on conceptualizing new technologies but also on their impressions and outcomes, offering opportunities for entrepreneurship and innovation and making them learn how to design systems that would incentivize behaviours to benefit society and understand the legal and ethical implications. The idea is to make students employable, knowledgeable and wise.

Elucidating rating

The rating provides a quantifiable measure on where to position a college. It is an outcome of student preferences, research output, quality education amongst others. It provides an overall pecking order. Though we have rated all the colleges that offer engineering programme at the undergraduate level, we have published only those institutes that are rated AAA and above. We have not rated three institutions namely DIAT, Pune; IIIT Bangalore and NIIE, Mumbai that have good ranks in NIRF 2019 as they do not offer 4-year B.Tech/BE or equivalent programmes in engineering.

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