Sixteen Indian places of learning are among the top 200 universities in The Times Higher Education BRICS and Emerging Economies rankings. The Indian Institute of Science broke into the top 20 for the first time and was listed at No. 16.
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, entered the top 30, with the premier engineering school ranked at 29. Last year, IISc and IIT Bombay were at 25 and 37, respectively. Other Indian institutes that have gained ground in the rankings include IIT-Madras (to 36 from 44), IIT Delhi (to 37 from 56) and IIT-Guwahati (to 83 from 98). Those that have declined include IIT-Kharagpur, IIT-Roorkee, IIT-Kanpur, Aligarh Muslim University and Panjab University.
Jawaharlal Nehru University, which was at 71 last year, isn't in the list this year. New entrants include Jadavpur University, Savitribhai Phule Pune University, University of Calcutta, University of Delhi, Amrita University and Andhra University. China dominates the overall rankings, including first and second place besides half the top 10. In the top 200, China has 39 universities.
The top five are Peking University (China), Tsingshua University (China), Lomonosov Moscow State University (Russia), University of Cape Town (South Africa) and National Taiwan University (Taiwan). Taiwan comes in at second position in the overall rankings with 24 universities in the top 200. India is the third best represented country.
"India will have to work harder to compete with other developing nations, such as Russia, which have a higher proportion of institutions in the upper echelons of the table. India is the only BRICS nation without a university in the top 10," said Phil Baty, editor, Times Higher Education World University Rankings.
India spends less than 0.88 per cent of its GDP on science research, compared with 2.76 per cent in the US and 4.04 per cent in South Korea, Baty said.
"With the population of young people in the country continuing to expand, resulting in further pressure on resources, it is now more crucial than ever that India invests in research and strengthens its links with other nations," he said.
During the unveiling of the BRICS Rankings by Times Higher Education at the Rashtrapati Bhawan, President Pranab Mukherjee expressed confidence that several higher education institutes in the country could emerge as the best amongst their global counterparts, even as he expressed concern over no Indian university getting such a ranking till now.
"Unfortunately, we have not been able to find the place commensurate to our size, culture, civilisation and population in the world ranking of the universities," he said while addressing scholars and educationists of BRICS nations at an event at Rashtrapati Bhavan.
He was speaking on the theme: 'Why emerging economies need world class universities', being hosted by Times Higher Education and O P Jindal University.
