IITs, IIMs figure in top world education rankings

London: Four Indian education institutions figure in the latest world university rankings, which continue to be topped by the universities of Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford, for their strengths in teaching and research.

The four Indian institutions are the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Delhi University (DU).

The IITs rank 57th in the list of world's top 200 universities while the IIMs have been ranked 68th. JNU comes 183rd on the list published by the Times Higher Education Supplement, an authoritative journal in academia.

In the list of the world's top 100 science universities, IITs rank 33rd, while in the list of top technology universities, the rank of IITs jumps to the third place after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of California, Berkeley.

The IIMs rank 68th on the list of top technology universities.

In the ranking of world's top universities in arts and humanities, Delhi University figures at rank 75. On the list for social sciences, it figures at rank 86. In this list, Delhi University is upstaged by IIMs at 26th and JNU at rank 57th.

Both IITs and JNU figure in the list of world's top universities for biomedicine, at ranks 70 and 99 respectively. In the world ranking for top 50 universities outside the US and Britain, the list features the IITs (15th rank), IIMs (19) and JNU (47).

In the overall rankings, Harvard University remains at the top and Imperial College London is the only newcomer in the top 10. Cambridge and Oxford moved up to second and third place after displacing MIT, which is now ranked fourth.

There are 29 British universities in the top 200 - six more than last year.

The university rankings are based on a survey of 3,703 academics worldwide. They were asked to nominate up to 30 institutions they regarded as the best at research in their own fields. On that measure, Cambridge came top, followed by Oxford then Harvard. Employers were also surveyed.