Indian varsities trail Asian peers, IITs emerge country's best

The best performance from Indian universities comes in engineering, reveals a new global ranking of top universities.

According to the 2013 QS World University 'rankings by subject', the Indian Institutes of Technology at  Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai are all ranked in the global top 50 in at least one of the four areas of engineering - civil, mechanical, electrical and chemical.

Indian Institute of Science ranks 50th in materials science.

Apart from them, the rankings reveal Indian universities are struggling to match the impact of their peers in other Asian countries.

The rankings show Indian universities have failed to make the top 200 in rankings in 12 of the 30 listed disciplines.

Not a single Indian univesrsity made it to the top-200 in medicine, law, economics and education.

The struggles of Indian institutes are in contrast to the strong performance of leading universities elsewhere in Asia, with institutions including National University of Singapore, University of Tokyo, Kyoto University Hong Kong University and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology making the global top 10 in several disciplines.

Thirty-five Chinese universities on the other hand have ranked in the top-50 in 23 subjects, compared to just four Indian universities.

''These rankings reflect the progress made by the IITs in recent years in engineering, but in many other areas of the academic spectrum India is lagging way behind its international competitors,'' says QS head of research Ben Sowter. ''India faces numerous challenges as it attempts to expand participation and increase university funding. These rankings make it clear that it is some way off achieving a truly internationally competitive higher education system.''

Covering 30 subjects, the QS World University Rankings by Subject is the largest international ranking of its kind. The rankings are based on surveys of some 70,000 academics and graduate employers, alongside research citations and a new 'H-Index' measuring research impact and productivity.

''These rankings provide the most comprehensive global comparison of universities yet at individual subject level,'' says Sowter. ''With the costs of higher education in many countries soaring it is vital to give students a robust international comparison, and QS remains the only major global ranking to take into account the views of employers.''

China leads the rankings amongst the BRIC countries with 88 universities making the top 200 in at least one subject, followed by Brazil with 58, India with 22, and Russia with 18.

US and UK universities dominate the list, with Harvard ranking number one in ten subjects, ahead of MIT (7), University of Oxford (4), UC Berkeley (4), University of Cambridge (3), Imperial College London (1) and UC Davis (1). Australian universities make the top 10 in 13 disciplines.

The QS World University Rankings is an annual league table of the top 600 universities in the world, published by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), which provides overall rankings as well as ranking for individual subjects.