Thursday, 9 May 2013

IITs shine in world university rankings

By Kounteya Sinha, TNN | 9 May, 2013, 05.29AM IST

IIT Delhi’s electrical engineering department has been ranked the 37th best globally, the highest entry from India across all categories in the latest QS world university rankings


LONDON: IIT Delhi's electrical engineering department has been ranked the 37th best globally, the highest entry from India across all categories in the latest Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) world university rankings.

QS is a reputed British education and career advice company, which, until 2010, produced the rankings with the Times Higher Education. The IIT Bombay's civil engineering department has been ranked 39while IIT Delhi's mechanical and aeronautical engineering department has been positioned 43rd. Indian Institute of Science ranks 50th in materials science.

IITs have come as the only saving grace for Indian universities in the rankings released on Wednesday. Not a single university or department has made it to the top 200 altogether in 12 of the 30 disciplines covered in the global rankings.

Important subjects without a single Indian institution featuring in the top 200 include medicine, law, economics and education.

The best performances from Indian universities came in the field of engineering , as expected. IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi and IIT Madras are all ranked in the global top 50 in at least one of the four areas of engineering: civil, mechanical , electrical and chemical.

Delhi University and JNU have made it to the top 100 in the world for English literature. Chinese universities, on the other hand, have bagged 37 top-50 rankings in 23 subjects, compared to just four for India.

"These rankings reflect the progress made by the IITs in recent years in engineering, but in many other areas of the academic spectrum, India is lagging way behind its international competitors ," said QS head of research Ben Sowter.

"India faces numerous challenges as it attempts to expand participation and increase university funding. These rankings make it clear that it is some way off achieving a truly internationally competitive higher education system ," he added.

Covering 30 subjects, the QS rankings by subject are the largest of their kind. The US and UK universities dominate the list, with Harvard ranking number one in 10 subjects, ahead of MIT (7), University of Oxford (4), UC Berkeley (4), University of Cambridge (3), Imperial College London (1) and UC Davis (1).

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