The absence of an Indian institution, even the IITs, from the top 10 of the 2014 QS University Rankings: BRICS, prompted Prime Minister Narendra Modi to call for an independent, India-specific ranking system for educational institutions. Comparisons of the quality of higher educational institutes across varied socio-political contexts are always fraught exercises, and India’s unspectacular performances in lists compiled by the two best-known private ranking systems, QS and Times Higher Education, have provoked accusations that the assessment criteria are skewed towards Western institutions. These charges aren’t entirely unfounded. The IITs do, for instance, suffer for not being allowed to admit international undergraduate students, which is one metric in the evaluation process. There are also government restrictions barring them from hiring foreign faculty, who can only be appointed for a temporary period subject to a minimum annual income. In both the QS and THE rankings, academic reputation is the dominant indicator. But the manner in which academic reputation surveys are conducted has long been questioned, with concerns that they are designed to select elite universities, most of which are in the West. Academics responding to such surveys also often nominate universities based on their past reputations or reputations in other areas, rather than on their knowledge of the institution. These very real biases suggest that the notion of a ranking system conceived specifically for India, one that factors in domestic challenges and priorities, is a valuable one. Yet, the temptation to attribute India’s consistently poor showing on lists of university rankings to flawed methodology must be avoided. After all, the BRICS rankings compare nations at nominally similar stages in their development. Yet even there, India is the only nation unrepresented in the top 10. The UPA years were marked by an inertia on education reform, with key bills that could address the structural problems limiting the availability of quality colleges and universities mouldering in Parliament. Poor rankings, for all the publicity they attract, are only a symptom of what afflicts the education system. The new government must not get distracted from the less glamorous but much more urgent task of pushing through higher education reform.
