While the absence of Indian institutes in the global rankings has become recurrent theme, a majority of our academicians do not consider Indian higher educational institutions as bad as the global rankings make them out to be. Indeed, they claim that, it is the global ranking systems that have loaded with methodological flaws and therefore unable to capture each country’s ground realities. The main objection is that global rankings do not adequately reflect the existence of a broad spectrum of institutions with very different missions, incommensurable resources and of varying sizes. For instance, major rankings agencies like Times Higher Education and Quacquarelli Symonds consider multiple performance indicators ranging from the number of research papers produced and the number of citations those papers received to the international faculty and international student ratio. In India, with growing number young population and their appetite for higher education, the universities focus more on teaching as many people as possible rather than creating a knowledge base or superior research facilities.

Looking to the future, it is evident that given the increasing internationalization of higher education and the competitive pressures on institutions, the debate on rankings will continue. However, we at The Higher Education Review Magazine value the positive impacts that a comprehensive ranking mechanism can create on a higher education system and therefore release our latest edition of ‘Top 25 Private/Deemed Universities in India Survey 2016.’ Here, we understand that India's best Universities are run by the Government; but the smartest universities that are emerging are doing so in the private sector. Hence, we provide assistance to the large community of students in India and enable them to choose the very best for themselves, by ranking the Top 25 Private/Deemed Universities in India every year.