IIT Ropar ranked 2nd in India, outranks older IIT branches

Making an impressive debut in Times Higher Education (THE) rankings, which were released in Zurich on Wednesday, Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar, secured the second position among institutions in India.

Accompanied by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, which secured the top rank in the country, it fell in the overall slab of 301-350 in the 2020 world rankings. The institution, which was established in 2008, outranked IIT  Bombay, IIT Delhi, IIT Kharagpur and IIT Indore.

As many as 56 Indian institutions made it to the list of best universities of the world this year. The ranking took into account 1,300 universities from 92 countries. Rankings are done across 13 performance indicators grouped into five parameters, including teaching, research, citations, international outlook and industry income. Teaching, research and citations constitute 30% weightage each while 7.5% and 2.5% weightage is constituted by international outlook and industry income, respectively.

IIT Ropar received a very high score in citation impact and industry income measure. Director of the institution professor SK Das said, “The institute has established key areas of research focus, including water, cancer research, environmental issues, electric vehicles, micro-grid technology, artificial intelligence, big data, and treatment of drug addiction. This is a proud moment for our institution and is the result of the hard work of our faculty, students, scholars and staff. We have expanded our infrastructure over the last few years, and brought in talent from the country and world. We also made it a point to finance research initiatives.”

No Indian institution is among the top 300 institutions in the world university rankings. (IISc), Bengaluru, slipped from the slab of 251-300, which it had achieved in the 2019 rankings.

Das said, “Our new research collaboration with Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Abdul Latif Jameel water and food systems lab and a new Indo-Taiwan joint research centre on artificial intelligence and machine learning are already showing results in terms of research quality and global outreach,” he said

He attributes these improvements to a string of government initiatives aimed at boosting the number of researchers and the quality of research in the country. “Higher education in India is undergoing substantial change,” he added.

IIT Ropar is spread over 500 acres of land on the bank of river Sutlej. There are 2003 students on campus 11 departments. The faculty strength is 163.    

Under ‘teaching,’ reputation survey, staff to student ratio, doctorate to bachelor ratio, doctorates awarded to academic ratio are taken into account. Under ‘research’, the volume, income and reputation is taken into account. International outlook is calculated through the number of international students, staff and collaborations and industry income through the income from industry in terms of the organisations willing to pay for research at the institutional level.