How We Ranked Them!

We have ranked 220 engineering institutes in the country based on: Faculty Details, Fee Structure, Research Activities and Placements on a scale of AAA+ to A, with AAA+ being the highest rank on the scale. The government institutes have been ranked based on perception voting and the private institutes have been ranked based on analysis of available data. We have also listed promising institutes in some zones, which have the potential to be in the top league in the coming years.

Ranking methodology ::
Public Institutes: We chose the best public institutes and Institutes of National Importance in a transparent and democratic manner through public voting.
We followed a two-step process:
Step 1: A list of Top 70 government-aided institutes (including IITs, NITs, IIITs and others) was prepared.
Step 2: We eliminated 20 institutes that received lowest number of votes, from the list of 70 shortlisted institutes.Based on the number of votes received by these institutes, we have declared the Top 50 Public Engineering Institutes.
The voting conducted on a popular social networking sites got an amazing response of 10, 097 unique votes. Among the voters, there were 4,829 students and alumni; 792 teachers and academics; 296 people representing coaching centres and 191 undergraduates.

Private Institutes: To gather maximum available information about any institute and ensure its credibility, we followed a three-step approach:
Step 1: We analysed the past three years’ rankings conducted by various organisations in the country. We filtered the list to eliminate colleges not ranked by any organisation in their previous rankings. Further, those institutes which featured only once in any of these rankings were also eliminated.
Step 2: We visited the official websites of 2,500+ institutes and private universities to get information such as Infrastructure, Placement, Teaching Pedagogy, Faculty, Foreign Collaborations and Research Activities. For AICTE
affiliated institutes, we got most of the information from the mandatory disclosures in their official website. However, the challenge was that most institutes did not have the updated disclosure on their website.
We also studied the student reviews in some of the education portals to get a better understanding about the institutions we have ranked.
Step 3: We also asked engineering institutions across the country to send us filled questionnaire in a given format.
Only 72 institutes reverted with filled questionnaire in the given deadline. Simultaneously, we were able to gather complete information of 1,500 odd colleges, out of the list of 2,500+ colleges that we had targeted.

Amit Khare,
Joint Secretary, Ministry of Human Resource Development,Government of India

The wealth of nations is judged by the intellectual property they have and not by their physical or mineral wealth. There is a need for integration of societies and countries. We may have manufacturing in one place, the user maybe at another place, and the workforce maybe coming from a separate country. This means, whatever education and skill development we wish to have must be of comparable standards and be such that it can be trans-located from one region to another.

Dr Ashwini Kumar Sharma, Managing Director,National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology(NIELIT) Digital literacy is very important in today’s world. Also, mobile penetration is growing. So, we have to plan for e-content for the mobiles because that’s the best component through which we can reach the last miles. With increased internet connectivity, I also believe that we have to go for a virtual classroom system, as we have shortage of quality teachers. Lastly, to enhance employability we have to focus on skill development.

Vimal Wakhlu, Chairman & Managing Director,Telecommunications Consultants India LimitedEducation is a great enabler as well as leveller. We have worked with former President APJ Abdul Kalam’s Pan-African e-Network project. It is one of the most successful projects where 10,000 students from 48 countries across Africa are enrolled in live, face-to-face classroom sessions. As we have seen from Pan-African model, there is a lot of potential for cooperation at the global level in terms of sharing of knowledge, content development, increasing accessibility, and improvisation of technology for e-networks.

Dr Akhilesh Gupta,
Secretary, University Grants Commission

The Government of India’s investment in research is roughly 0.95 percent of the GDP, and it aims to increase this to two percent by the end of this plan period. We are working on the Singh-Obama Knowledge Initiative, and working for collaborations between foreign and Indian universities for the purpose of research and innovation.

Dr S S Jena,
Chairman, National Institute of Open Schooling

Globally, the open learning education resources have gained a great momentum and we must pace ourselves with this particular approach for improving quality in education. We have to create a safety net for the disadvantaged groups or school dropouts so that they complete their education up to secondary level. We should collaborate and develop good quality resources that will be available at a particular platform.

“Excellence in education has become a buzzword today, and is very often
used in clichéd terms. But I think excellence is an overall package of character building with focus on values, and the final summit is that of creating a good human being,” said Gowri Ishwaran, CEO, The Global Education & Leadership Foundation, during a roundtable discussion at the third edition of World Education Summit 2013.
Speaking about current schooling systems, Col V K Gaur, Advisor,  anav Rachna Educational Institutions said, “Nowadays, schools have become factories that are more concerned about how many of their students have been selected for the IITs or IIMs. Excellence for them only means what converts into money. This is the state of affairs at the highest  level in the country. Sadly, India only has two percent of skilled workforce.”
“Excellence will be there if we focus on Adhyayan (study), Adhyaapan (teaching), Abhayaas (practice), and Vyavahaar (behaviour),” Col Gaur added.
Elaborating upon the distinctive approach towards educating young minds, Steven Rudolph, Director, Jiva Education said, “Every morning in our school we give 15 minutes to what we call SOESelf Others Environment, and we do swadhyaya (self-study). Every student talks to the other student about what good deeds he has done, and what problems he is facing.”
Pointing towards the need for increased partnership between educators and parents to promote excellence in schools Rudolph added, “My belief on how we get excellence is through finding out what is the nature of the child, analysing it over the years, making him reflect with his parents, and setting him on the right path.”
Kavita Das, Principal, St John’s High School, Chandigarh, spoke about the importance of bridging the rich-poor divide in education, “We should not forget that there are millions out there who are very poor and who need to be educated. We have to start bringing them in our schools, and start integrating them rather than treating them as separate members of the society. The schools need to start widening their perspectives and not only cater to the  haves of the society, but should also start looking at the have-nots.”
Muhammad Husain Zulqarnain from The Knowledge Bridges International Schools, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia added, “Einstein once said that it is not intellect but character that makes great scientists. If you are not imbibing character among students in schools, they will not get to learn it elsewhere.” Discussion also highlighted the need of having gurus. “Are we having teachers or gurus, because there is a difference between the two. If we have good gurus then we are actually going to do good to the society. Nowadays, moral values have gone down, and schools need to  nclude moral lessons and personality development classes. It is not only about teaching,” said one of the participants. Summing up the session, Anirudh Gupta, CEO, DCM Group of Schools said, “Generally K-12 is referred to as 15 years of school education. If we substract whatever syllabi or curriculum taught in all those 15 years from the child’s personality, then whatever is left with the child is what the holistic education means.”