IIT Madras, Kanpur break into top-50 in QS University Rankings Asia 2016

Two more Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) broke into the top-50 in the latest Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) University Rankings Asia 2016.

IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur jumped 13 and 10 places, respectively, to be ranked in the top 50 universities’ rankings among Asian countries by QS, global higher education analysts. As against its rank of 56 in 2015, IIT Madras was placed at 43 this year, while IIT Kanpur got ranked 48th in 2016, up from 58 last year.

Among Indian universities featuring in the top-50 list in the QS University Rankings Asia, IIT Bombay and IIT Madras joined the likes of Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore (33), IIT Bombay (35) and IIT Delhi (36).

Further, two Indian universities debuted the rankings this year — Amrita University, which ranked a joint 169th, and Andhra University, which debuted in the 301st-350th band.  The biggest leap among Indian universities was seen by the University of Delhi and the University of Calcutta wherein the former rose by 25 places to 66th, the latter jumped 41 places to 108th.

India’s performance as a nation is the 5th-best of the 17 countries that feature in the rankings. With 23 universities, it is outperformed by Taiwan (34), South Korea (54), Japan (72), and China (82). Eleven Indian universities score the benchmark score of 100.0 for QS. 

In the overall rankings, the National University of Singapore and University of Hong Kong retained their first and second positions, respectively, for this year.

The QS University Rankings Asia was expanded this year to include the region’s 350 best universities and an expansion of 50 on the previous year. The rankings also saw methodological enhancements this year, introducing staff with PhD in order to add another dimension to the analyses of teaching quality their rankings provide.