Reaching For The Stars

A lag in research has hampered the global ranking of Indian universities. This year, our ranking gives significant weightage to research-related attributes.

- Kaushik Deka

What makes a university stand apart from the rest? Is it the quality of students enrolled and faculty engaged in teaching, or the infrastructure? These certainly have a role as the university strives to gain excellence, but are not the primary driver. A close scrutiny of the table toppers in the India today-MDRA survey of India’s best universities reveals that they all have one thing in common—the constant endeavour to innovate and adapt to the growing needs of the local, national and global environment.

This singular trait adds glory to the legacy of reputed universities, pushing them to the top of the rankings year after year. It also exposes an unfortunate trend—in all four categories, the top five universities have faced minimal challenge from the emerging ones. This low-intensity competition also reflects in the performance of Indian universities in global rankings. Only a couple of Indian universities have been able to make it to the top order of global rankings though these rankings, as Jawaharlal Nehru University vice-chancellor M. Jagadesh Kumar puts it, cannot be accepted as the last word on Indian universities. “Most of these ranking methodologies focus on the number of Nobel laureates the universities have produced or the volume of funds they receive. The size of the corpus of some of these universities could be higher than the national budget of some countries. We cannot have such a scenario in our country,” says Kumar.

Indian universities don’t produce Nobel winners because our higher education institutes have lagged behind in the area of research. Of course, funds do play a role in promoting research, and Kumar agrees that a socially relevant research project will always attract funds, either from government or private sources.