Opinion Express View: Indian universities climb QS rankings — but can they go global?

The performance of Indian institutes in the QS University World Ranking System, released last week, shows that their initiatives to upgrade the research ecosystem are yielding results. Nine institutes in the country figure in the top 50 and 79 Indian universities have made it to the list, up from 69 last year. Indian universities are particularly well represented in engineering (24 institutes), social sciences (20 institutes) and natural sciences (19 institutes). It’s heartening that at a time when several reports and surveys have called out the skill deficit of Indian graduates, the QS survey speaks of the strides taken by the country’s top universities to improve their standing among employers. However, QS 2025 also shows where the country lags in its endeavour to become a top knowledge economy destination. It underlines that India’s elite universities need to improve student learning experiences and enhance their global presence.

The resources available to students for teaching, supervision and curriculum development play a crucial role in their learning experiences. The top runners in the QS ranking system have a near perfect score on that metric. The best Indian universities, in contrast, score between 10 and 20. Attracting an adequate number of qualified faculty and providing them with favourable working conditions has been a longstanding problem of the country’s higher education milieu. In 2023, a CAG audit found that though the IITs have been recruiting faculty consistently, the pace of recruitment did not match student enrolment. This historical weakness has, however, never been scientifically quantified. In 2009, a task force set up by the erstwhile Ministry of Human Resource Development, called for “standing mechanism to monitor the size and quality of faculty resources and for data on faculty members to be made available on the website of every academic institution”. This recommendation has, at best, been partially implemented. The government does collect faculty-related data for its Annual Survey of Higher Education. However, this is a voluntary process for institutions and the numbers are not verified by an independent agency.

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The QS survey suggests that Indian universities could benefit from global collaborations which enable the “country’s scholars to access a wider range of academic debates and discoveries”. The National Education Policy too rightly emphasises the role of cross-border collaborations. The government has also invited universities outside the country to set up campuses in India. And, in 2023, IIT-Madras set up a wing in Zanzibar, Tanzania. Internationalisation is, however, a work in progress. The need of the hour is to liberalise the student exchange rules between Indian and foreign universities as well as build linkages with industry. Indian education administrators could perhaps do well to take cues from the 17-year-old tie-up between IIT-Bombay, among the consistent performers from the country in global ratings, and Monash University in Australia. If there’s one message from the latest QS rankings it’s this — top Indian institutes require more of such nurturing. That could provide them with the experience required to play a critical role in the education milieu — handhold the smaller universities that cater to the bulk of the needs of the country’s aspirational classes.