When Reputation Came Before Rankings

Long before rankings became an obsession, India’s leading institutions had earned their standing through serious scholarship and mentorship.

There was a time when Indian universities did not wait anxiously for an annual announcement to know who they were. There were no league tables, no accreditation cycles, no dashboards of perception indices. And yet, as history shows, Indian higher education produced scholars of global standing and institutions of intellectual depth.

In 1857, three universities were established in India at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. They functioned for more than a century without ranking frameworks. Graduates from these institutions entered the civil services, judiciary, academia, and scientific establishments with intellectual confidence that travelled well beyond India’s borders. Their influence was visible in colonial administration, nationalist leadership, scientific laboratories, and later in global academic networks. The measure of their success was not a percentile position but the quality of minds they shaped and the institutions they helped build across the world.

Cultivated Reputations

In 1909, Indian Institute of Science was founded. It went on to become one of Asia’s most respected research institutions. There was no domestic ranking validating its position. Its standing grew through research contributions, faculty quality, and international collaborations. Distinguished faculty trained generations of scientists who later led laboratories in India and abroad. Recognition came through peer review, global conferences, and scholarly citation, not through annual score announcements.

After Independence, India established institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology and All India Institute of Medical Sciences. These institutions built global reputations long before any Indian national ranking existed. Their alumni became leaders in science, engineering, medicine, entrepreneurship, and policy. The brand emerged organically from performance, not from position in a table. International recognition followed from research quality, competitive admissions, rigorous training, and alumni distinction rather than from structured domestic assessment.

The question then arises: were these universities poor performers simply because they lacked formal evaluation systems? The historical record suggests the opposite.

What sustained quality in that earlier era was not the absence of scrutiny but the presence of a strong academic culture. The system was smaller and more selective, which allowed peer scrutiny and intellectual standards to function as natural regulators. Faculty members were central to institutional identity; a university’s stature was often inseparable from the scholarship, integrity, and mentorship of its professors. Legitimacy flowed outward from research publications, scholarly debate, and alumni achievement rather than inward from bureaucratic certification. Academic autonomy in curriculum, hiring, and research direction allowed institutions to evolve according to disciplinary needs rather than compliance templates.

Academic conversations were driven by ideas and intellectual disagreements, not by reporting formats or performance dashboards. Institutional memory was built through mentorship chains and scholarly traditions rather than through regulatory documentation.

None of this implies that the past was flawless. There were structural limitations and access barriers. Yet excellence existed, and it did not depend on scorecards.

Dramatic Expansion

Why, then, did rankings and accreditations emerge? The answer lies in scale and complexity. Since the 1990s, India’s higher education system has expanded dramatically. Enrolments have multiplied, private and state universities have proliferated, and the diversity of institutional quality has widened. Students and parents require reliable signals to distinguish institutions. Public funding demands accountability. In this environment, frameworks such as the National Institutional Ranking Framework and the National Assessment and Accreditation Council were introduced to introduce transparency and comparability in a mass system. When a system grows from dozens of universities to hundreds, informal reputation networks alone cannot sustain quality differentiation. Structured information becomes necessary for students, policymakers, and society.

The intention was understandable. Informal peer reputation alone could no longer sustain trust across hundreds of institutions. Structured evaluation became a policy necessity.

However, once scores begin to influence funding, autonomy, admissions demand, and public image, institutions may gradually shift their energy toward optimising indicators rather than strengthening fundamentals. What can be measured begins to dominate what truly matters. Quantifiable metrics acquire disproportionate authority, even when intellectual quality, mentorship depth, and ethical culture remain resistant to numerical capture. Administrative calendars start revolving around reporting deadlines instead of academic milestones.

Research strategies tilt toward publication counts rather than conceptual depth. Faculty hiring subtly aligns with metric visibility rather than long-term intellectual fit. These distortions become predictable when numbers turn into institutional currency.

The paradox is striking. India built globally respected institutions without rankings. Today, despite multiple ranking and accreditation systems, anxiety about standards persists. This does not mean that evaluation caused decline, nor does it imply that assessment mechanisms are unnecessary. It reveals instead that measurement is a tool, not a substitute for academic culture.

A university becomes excellent when it recruits and retains strong faculty, protects intellectual freedom, fosters rigorous mentorship, sustains research integrity, and nurtures curiosity rather than compliance. These elements operate over decades. They are lived practices, not annual submissions. They depend on leadership that values scholarship over spectacle and long-term academic investment over short-term visibility.

When academic culture is strong, rankings merely confirm what is already visible. When that culture weakens, rankings grow louder, attempting to compensate for internal fragility.

India does not need to abandon evaluation frameworks. In a large and diverse system, some structure is indispensable. But we must guard against confusing measurement with merit. Reputation, in its deepest sense, is slow to build and difficult to fabricate. It grows from sustained scholarship, institutional integrity, and generational continuity. It cannot be manufactured annually. It cannot be engineered through perception surveys alone.

The universities that shaped India’s intellectual history did not wake up waiting for their rank. They woke up to teach, to research, to debate, and to mentor. Their standing followed naturally.

The real question before us is not whether rankings should exist. It is whether we can rebuild a culture in which rankings become secondary once again. Where reputation is earned quietly, through substance, and announced not by a score, but by enduring contribution.

(The author is an ANRF Prime Minister Professor at COEP Technological University, Pune; former Director of the Agharkar Research Institute, Pune; and former Visiting Professor at IIT Bombay. Views personal).