India's Top 100 In Academic Brilliance

The elites are running faster. The good ones struggle to keep the pace up. Story of Indian Universities...

- B Mahesh Sarma & Dr. Nimesh Chandra

Ranking still remains a hot button issue, but the arrival and stabilisation of the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) has resulted in most good institutions begrudgingly admit the necessity of such an exercise.

Why ranking remains a challenge?

There has been an ongoing debate within and outside Careers360 as to the efficacy of the ranking process, especially since NIRF has begun ranking of universities. The problem is that most universities in India are affiliating type ones where they just exist as examination conducting and degree awarding bodies with very little of actual research or teaching happening within their departments. To add to the confusion, there are deemed-to-be universities which the judiciary has last year ruled as not being equal to universities.

What is new this year?

Universities do not change that fast, especially in the public sector. So, our honour rolls in the public universities, especially in the top 30, more or less remains constant. But the private sector is witnessing drastic changes with each passing year. New institutions like Shiv Nadar University and Azim Premji University are making giant strides. Intellectual property until this year has been always signified by patents (filed and granted). This year we have also taken industrial research earnings, MDPs/consulting into consideration to give more diversity to the indicator.

The list that has emerged is a relatively robust indicator of how Indian degree granting institutions stack up on the basis of their research and teaching. We still consider INIs as part of the university set up, while NIRF does not do so.

But this is only a broad indicator. Since most of the education happens in schools/centres, domain-wise ranking that we do is more appropriate for final decision making, but a university-level ranking is a good benchmark to start the decision process.