India’s growing prominence in global university rankings has opened a transformative opportunity to drive innovation, strengthen research culture, and elevate quality across its higher education system. If used strategically, rankings can evolve from mere labels into instruments of meaningful improvement.
In the QS World University Rankings: Asia 2026, India emerged as the second-most represented nation after China, with seven institutions in the top 100 and 294 ranked universities. Similarly, in the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings 2026, India is the second-most represented country, with 128 institutions—up from 107 last year and just 19 in 2016. IISc Bengaluru secured a place in the 201–250 band, a position once unimaginable for an Indian institute.
With India’s higher education sector currently valued at $70 billion and projected to reach $150–200 billion within a decade, mere expansion in scale will not be enough. To educate a young workforce, boost research, and fuel entrepreneurship, rankings must become catalysts for evolution rather than endpoints of evaluation.
The idea of ranking institutions dates back to 1910 when psychologist James McKeen Cattell attempted to measure “scientific strength” by mapping eminent scholars to universities. The global ranking ecosystem came into existence with Shanghai’s Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) in 2003, followed by the QS–Times Higher Education lists in 2004.
India’s structured response emerged in 2015 with the launch of the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), designed to evaluate teaching, research, inclusion, outcomes, and perception. Managed by the National Board of Accreditation (NBA) with data validation by INFLIBNET, NIRF marked a shift from basic accreditation to quality benchmarking.
Unlike accreditation, which checks if essentials such as faculty, labs, and libraries exist, rankings assess how well institutions perform compared to their peers.
Since 2015, NIRF submissions have nearly tripled, indicating greater institutional willingness to be evaluated against standardized metrics. The introduction of penalties for retracted papers and misreported data reflected a maturing system.
Rankings have changed institutional behavior, prompting leaders to focus on outcomes, doctoral ecosystems, supervision quality, and citation standards. They are establishing internal mechanisms to track performance, improve research integrity, and align faculty incentives with excellence.
Global rankings such as THE, QS, and ARWU have become tools for collaboration and diplomacy. They boost international visibility, attract faculty, and facilitate research partnerships.
While some institutions, including several IITs, have raised concerns about transparency and methodology, the larger lesson has been the need for evolving methods rather than rejection of evaluation.
To make rankings more purposeful for India, three key reforms have been proposed. First, a mission-sensitive design should compare like with like—differentiating between teaching-led, research-intensive, and emerging institutions.
Second, long-term capacity building should be rewarded over year-to-year jumps, recognizing steady improvement in teaching, research, innovation, and inclusion. Third, data integrity must be strengthened through simplified reporting, third-party verification, and aligned accreditation and ranking pipelines.
To achieve true system-wide impact, the ranking frameworks must eventually encompass over 50,000 colleges and 1,200 universities.
A phased approach with digital templates, strong institutional research offices, and predictable audits can help bring smaller colleges into the fold, gradually raising the overall quality bar.
Rankings, when used wisely, can serve as a compass guiding institutions toward clarity of purpose. They should help a regional university focus on social mobility, a research university deepen its scholarly rigor, and comprehensive universities balance multiple missions.
In the end, rankings matter not merely because they confer prestige, but because they make improvement visible.
They help families make informed choices, policymakers direct resources, and universities evolve. In a knowledge-driven future, this visibility is essential for credibility, innovation, and national growth.
