Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, has topped the first-ever standalone ranking of Indian higher education institutions by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), the global higher education think tank responsible for the world’s most-consulted world university rankings. It was ranked #162 in the world in the QS world rankings 2019.

Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, ranked #170 in global rankings and second best Indian institution, stands second here as well. The other top 10 Indian institutions include seven IITs, with the IITs at Madras, Delhi, Kharagpur and Kanpur standing #3, #4, #5 and #6 respectively.
Apart from the government funded institutes of technology, University of Hyderabad stands seventh, the University of Delhi stands eighth in the rankings. Other institutions that stand out based on parameters include Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai which achieves the highest score of the QS’s indicator of research impact, adjusted for faculty size; Shivaji University, Kolhapur; Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore achieves perfect score in the faculty/student indicator

The most notable absentee was Jawaharlal Nehru University, ranked sixth in NIRF. It was not considered for being single-faculty at undergraduate level.
Institutions have been scored on academic reputation (30 per cent), employer reputation (20 per cent), faculty-student ratio (20 per cent), proportion of staff with PhD (10 per cent), papers per faculty from Scopus database (10 per cent), citations per paper from Scopus database (5 per cent), proportion of international students (2.5 per cent) and proportion of international faculty (2.5 per cent).