IITs Far Behind in Terms of Research, IISc Bangalore at a Better Position: Study

In a computational analysis of the older IITs, it was recently revealed that the best performing technical institutes of our country, including Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur , were way far behind in terms of research performance as compared to the top ranking world universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA and the popular Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. The study further indicated that a lot of effort and support will be crucial for the performance of IITs to be considered up to that level.

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Mr. Vivek Kumar Singh from the Department of Computer Science of Banaras Hindu University (BHU) was the lead author of the study. Below are some of the facts and inputs that he derived from the analysis conducted. Please note that the study excluded the seven recent IITs.

Snapshot of the Computational Analysis:

• NTU was established in 1991 and is younger than the five older IITs, which clearly indicates that the age of an institution alone is not necessarily linked to higher performance.
• IITs are still behind in terms of research performance in comparison to Indian Institute of Science (IISc) .
• The data was examined in order to determine the productivity, productivity per capita, the rate of growth of research output, collaboration pattern and authorship, citation impact and discipline-wise research strength of the different Indian Institutes of Technology.
• New IITs are quite young for a research performance in comparison to old IITs. Although, some new IITs, particularly the IIT-I (IIT-Indore) show promising research performance.
• The major chunk of research activities at the IITs is being done in chemistry, physics, and mathematics disciplines and the institutes lag in research in the field of engineering, in particular.

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About the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs):

Below is a list of IITs in chronological order:

• The first ever IIT was established in the year 1951 at Kharagpur. It was followed by IIT Bombay (1958) , IIT Madras (1959) , IIT Kanpur (1959) and IIT Delhi (1961) . These IITs were established with the help of foreign collaborations.
• In the year 1961, the Parliament also passed the Institutes of Technology Act that further declared these institutions as 'Institutes of National Importance'.
• Then, three decades later, IIT Guwahati was established in 1994 followed by the conversion of Roorkee University into IIT Roorkee in 2001.
• In the time period between 2008 and 2012, 9 more IITs were established at Bhubaneswar , Hyderabad , Gandhinagar , Jodhpur , Ropar , Patna , Indore , Varanasi and Mandi .
• Later, during 2015 and 16, 7 more IITs were proposed at Jammu , Palakkad , Dhanbad , Tirupati , Goa , Bhilai and Dharwad .
• The 7 IITs which were at least 15 years old fell in one group, whereas the 9 IITs which were established during 2008-2012 were grouped together, and the third group comprised of the recent 7 IITs established in the years 2015-16.