Eight Indian universities have made the top 400 of the QS World University Rankings 2022, published in June by the British higher education analysts Quacquarelli Symonds. The Indian names that stand out in the QS Ranking 2022: IIT Bombay, top 400 newcomer IIT Guwahati, and the Indian Institute of Science, which QS scored as the strongest research university in the world on one of its measures.
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, IIT-Delhi, and IISc Bangalore feature among the top 200. IIT-Bombay with a rank of 177 is the best from India but has fallen five spots from the previous edition of the QS rankings. IIT-Delhi and IISC stood 185th and I86th respectively.
IIT-Madras ranked 255th, improved by 20 ranks and IIT-Kanpur was ranked at 277th, bettering from its 350th spot last time. IIT-Guwahati made its debut among the top 400 this time, with a global rank of 395, better by 75 positions from the previous edition.
IIT-Bombay retained its status as India’s top university for the fourth consecutive year.
“ IIT Delhi has become India’s second-best university, having risen from 193rd to 185th over the last twelve months. It has done so by overtaking the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore (IISc Bangalore),” British ranking agency QS said.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) remains in the top spot for a record 10 years now, while the University of Oxford rose to the second position for the first time since 2006. Stanford University and the University of Cambridge shared the third spot.
QS Ranking 2022: India’s top 400 places and the government’s reading
The Ministry of Education treated the result as a policy success. In a release issued through the Press Information Bureau on 9 June 2021, it said QS had published the 18th edition of its world rankings and that three Indian universities had reached the top 200. The Union Education Minister, Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’, congratulated IIT Bombay on 177th place, IIT Delhi on 185th and IISc Bengaluru on 186th, and the release headlined QS’s finding that IISc ranked first in the world for research.
Pokhriyal said India was “taking a leap in the field of Education & Research”. The release credited two government measures by name: the minister said the National Education Policy 2020 and the Institute of Eminence scheme were instrumental in ranking Indian colleges and institutes globally.
The detail in the QS Ranking 2022, from IIT Bombay’s place to the top 400 debuts and the research scores, points in two directions at once. The same table that gave IISc a perfect citations score also recorded falls in the Faculty/Student Ratio for most Indian entrants, and teaching capacity is the measure on which QS says Indian universities continue to struggle.
Indian universities have made consistent progress in QS’s Academic Reputation (AR) metric: 20 of India’s 35 entrants have improved their AR scores, with only nine witnessing drops. Indian universities have also improved their research impact, relative to global competitors. Seventeen of India’s 35 universities have seen a rise in the Citations per Faculty (CPF) score, the British ranking agency said.
“According to the CPF indicator, when universities are adjusted for faculty size, IISc Bangalore is the world’s top research university, achieving a perfect score of 100/100 for this metric. IIT Guwahati (41st for CPF) is also a top-50 research institution,” the survey said.
Indian universities, however, continue to struggle in QS’s measure of institutional teaching capacity. Twenty-three of India’s 35 universities have suffered declines in QS’s Faculty/Student Ratio indicator.
Jawaharlal Nehru University made its debut in the QS World University Rankings, placed in the 561-570 band. In total, 35 Indian institutions feature in the published table. Of these, seven improved their position, seven saw a decline, 14 retained their spots from last time and seven were new entrants.
The Institution of Eminence link
The three Indian universities in the top 200 are the three public institutions the government picked in July 2018 for its Institutions of Eminence scheme. According to the Ministry of Human Resource Development’s announcement of 9 July 2018, an expert committee chaired by N. Gopalaswami recommended the Indian Institute of Science, IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi from the public sector, along with three private institutions: the Jio Institute in Pune, under a greenfield category, BITS Pilani and the Manipal Academy of Higher Education. The ministry had received 114 applications, 74 of them from public institutions.
Each public institution chosen was to receive up to Rs 1,000 crore over five years. The scheme also loosened the rules on them: they could admit foreign students up to 30 per cent of intake, recruit foreign faculty up to 25 per cent of staff, offer up to 20 per cent of their programmes online, and collaborate with the world’s top 500 institutions without UGC permission. The government said at the time that it expected the selected institutions to come up in the top 500 of world rankings within 10 years, and eventually in the top 100.
By the 2022 edition, all three public institutions were already inside the top 200, though none was close to the top 100 the scheme set as its eventual goal.
What has happened since
Five years after the QS Ranking 2022, IIT Bombay is no longer the country’s highest-placed institution. In the QS World University Rankings 2027, released in June 2026, IIT Delhi placed 118th globally and was India’s highest-ranked institution, with IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay and IIT Madras all in the world’s top 200, according to All India Radio’s News On AIR, which reported the Education Ministry’s statement on 18 June 2026.
The ministry said 52 Indian institutions featured in the 2027 table, against the 35 counted in the 2022 edition, and that 13 Indian universities were in the global top 550. Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said the result reflected the growing strength of India’s higher education system, according to the same report.
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