JNU India’s best varsity, IIM-A in world top-25

NEW DELHI: The prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University, which found itself embroiled in a series of attacks from right-wingers, was adjudged as the highest-ranked university in India in the coveted rankings announced by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), the London-based higher education analytics firm. The university is ranked at 20th position globally for development studies.

IIM-Ahmedabad is among the top 25 institutions globally for business and management studies while IIM-Bangalore and IIM-Calcutta are among the top 50, according to the QS World University Rankings by Subject, announced on Wednesday.

The Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences, Chennai, is at 24th position globally for dentistry studies.

In this year’s QS World University Rankings by Subject, India has demonstrated significant progress, with a 20 per cent improvement in the Citations per Paper indicator. Additionally, there has been a 16 per cent growth in the International Research Network indicator, which measures the volume and diversity or research partnerships.

However, there was a decrease of 5 per cent in the H Index, which assesses the balance between research productivity and its impact. According to QS, India stands as one of the world’s most rapidly expanding research centres, surging by 54 per cent between 2017 to 2022. This is more than double the global average and also significantly exceeds the output of its more traditionally recognised Western peers.

However, India’s performance in securing citations in premier global journals as defined by CiteScore metrics is far from impressive. Between 2017 and 2021, only 15 per cent of research was cited in top-tier journals, a stark with its nearest competitors in research volume, the UK (38%) and Germany (33%).

QS CEO Jessica Turner noted that recognising the challenge of providing high-quality tertiary education, the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 set an ambitious target of a 50 per cent gross enrolment ratio by 2035. “It should, therefore, provide some reassurance that the number of Indian programmes featuring across our 55 subject rankings and five broad faculty areas has increased this year - from 355 to 454.”