Research impact and sustainability, but focus remains students: IIT Delhi’s formula for QS success

IIT Bombay by contrast declined 25 places in Citations per Faculty, even though it continued to score strongly on employer reputation and academic reputation. But weaker performance on international engagement indicators weighed down its overall ranking.

Overall, “Global peers are gaining momentum while institutions across India are improving at a comparatively slower pace,” Sowter said.

Administrators at IIT Delhi attributed the improved rank to the fulfilment of broader institutional goals.

“Whatever goes on inside the QS algorithm, our job is different,” Somnath Baidya Roy, Dean of Planning at IIT Delhi, told The Indian Express. “We want to be a leader in providing technological education at affordable rates to all our students.”

Roy said the institute remains focused on attracting talent, improving infrastructure, and strengthening research rather than on ranking indicators. “One of the reasons for our success is that we have continued to attract the best students and faculty. We are a preferred destination for students across India,” he said.

In the QS World University Rankings by Subject announced earlier this year, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, Chemical Engineering and Civil Engineering at IIT Delhi featured among the world’s top 50 programs. IIT Delhi also retained its position as India’s highest-ranked institution in Engineering and Technology with a global rank of 36.

Sustainability, an area in which IIT Delhi remains the highest ranked institution in India, has played a key role over the last two years. Last year, sustainability was identified as a reason for IIT Delhi overtaking IIT Bombay. Roy said IIT Delhi had consciously built sustainability into its institutional framework.

“A couple of years back, we decided that IIT Delhi was already doing a lot of activities related to sustainability and we needed to emphasise them. At the time, it was not because sustainability was a metric in rankings,” he said.

Sustainability efforts emerged from a combination of student demands, institutional priorities, and government regulations, Roy said. “We came up with our sustainability policy and we are acting on our sustainability action plan,” he said.

He pointed to green building initiatives, environmental programs and academic units such as Atmospheric Sciences and Civil and Environmental Engineering as examples of the way sustainability had become embedded across the institute.

“Most importantly, sustainability is an integral part of our curriculum,” he said.

IIT Delhi is also betting on a broader transformation for the coming decade, having begun to implement a revamped curriculum aimed at making education more interdisciplinary while giving students greater flexibility in designing their academic pathways. “We are looking at interdisciplinarity and also giving students more flexibility in terms of designing their own education,” Roy said.

The revised framework expands opportunities for minors and specialisations and places greater emphasis on internships and engagement with industry and society. “We are now encouraging MTech students to take up internships under the new curriculum,” he said.

The institute’s Vision 2035 roadmap will guide infrastructure development, laboratory upgrades and internationalisation efforts. “We are also emphasising globalisation,” Roy said. “More international students are coming as exchange students.”

At the end though, IIT Delhi remains about its students, Roy said. “Our students are getting top jobs in academia, research, and industry. Our alumni are doing extremely well. Our product is our students. That’s the story here.”