A DEA-TOPSIS-based approach for performance evaluation of Indian technical institutes

Since independence, India has been one of the few developing countries to invest extensively in both science and technical education. In India, technical education plays a pivotal role in human resource development while creating skilled manpower, increasing industrial productivity and enhancing the quality of life. If a technical institute means to be effective in developing learned and qualified engineers, then it would be useful to know the performance of that technical institution. However, measuring the performance of a technical institution has received very little attention because it is very difficult to measure its output. Thus, this paper focuses on assessing the performance of eight Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) using a combined approach of data envelopment analysis (DEA) and technique of order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). In the first phase, DEA is applied to shortlist the efficient IITs having the desired characteristics from the stakeholders’ point of view, and TOPSIS method is then employed to rank those efficient IITs while also identifying the best performing IIT. It is observed that IIT Kharagpur outperforms all the considered IITs which exactly corroborates with the findings of the recently published surveys/reports.