The 2026 Times Higher Education rankings make for grim reading. Not one Indian university features in the world’s top 200 universities. By contrast, Japan has five, South Korea has six, and China has 13. And the gap is widening. China now has five universities in the top 40 worldwide (this rises to seven if we include Hong Kong) and its national champions, Tsinghua and Peking, are on the verge of breaking into the world’s top 10.

We are not without hope. The National Education Policy signals that the government wants to do better. The continued development of IITs and IIMs, which have begun setting up international campuses, bodes well. More promising is the rise of well-run private universities, symbolised above all by Ashoka University. Even so, to know if Indian universities can “catch up” with the rest of Asia, we need to understand why they fell behind in the first place.

We need to start with the fact that modern education arrived in India sooner than elsewhere in Asia. When the Japanese launched Keio University in 1858, Hindu College, Elphinstone College, and Presidency College were already thriving. By the time the Chinese set up Peking University in 1898, British India had five public universities, and the Native States had established their Maharaja’s Colleges. These institutions housed great minds, from JC Bose, PC Ray, and Ashutosh Mukherjee in Bengal and KT Telang, MG Ranade, and RG Bhandarkar in Bombay, to Sundaram Pillai and BN Seal in Mysore, Aurobindo Ghosh and TK Gajjar in Baroda, and Aghorenath Chattopadhyay in Hyderabad (and this is only to skim the surface). Clearly, we do not have to hark back to Takshashila and Nalanda to think........

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