Ranking of varsities to be an annual affair: Irani

Asserting that the India Rankings 2016 would immensely help students to choose varsities for higher education, Union Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Smriti Irani on Monday said that the government is aiming to release these rankings in April every year.

Irani said that these rankings would also greatly help foreign students aspiring to pursue higher education in India.

"These rankings have been done on the basis of science, research, academic and learning outcome. It is a matter of happiness that around 60, 000 people contributed to this. We had setup a mechanism in which the perception that a certain institute has among people was a parameter. Around 1.5 lakhs votes were cast, which helped us to arrive at this conclusion," she told reporters here.

The HRD Minister also heaped praise on MHRD officials and representatives of education body's regulators for undertaking biggest study of its kind in the history of the nation.

"We also got the data verified by third parties. I would like to congratulate all the representatives of our regulators and from MHRD for carrying out the biggest survey in the history. Our aim is to make these ranking appear very year in first week of April so that it helps those choosing universities," she added.

IIT Madras has been adjudged the best engineering college and IIM Bengaluru the best management institute in the country as per India Rankings 2016.

IIT Mumbai and IIT Kharagpur are second and third in engineering category, whereas IIM Ahmedabad is ranked no. 2 and IIM Calcutta is ranked no. 3 in the respective category.

In pharmacy category the list was topped by Manipal College of Pharmaceutical Sciences is ranked number one while University Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (Chandigarh) and Jamia Hamdard, is on second and third position respectively.

The ranking evaluates higher educational institutions in Engineering, Management, Universities and Pharmacy categories.