Inside India’s ‘metric raj’: How global rankings are reshaping higher education

Global rankings threaten research integrity, pedagogical freedom and Indian scholarship

The university ranking system in the country has become increasingly prolific. What was once a single annual list has expanded into multiple rankings based on different criteria, released every year by different agencies. QS, for instance, released the World University Rankings in June 2025 and World University Rankings: Sustainability 2026 in November 2025. These rankings rely heavily on data curated by Scopus, a subscription-based database of peer-reviewed literature that indexes journals, conference proceedings and other scholarly content worldwide.

The rise of such global ranking systems has had profound consequences for Indian higher education. This change represents a shift in sovereignty: the power to define intellectual excellence has moved from the democratic institutions of the country to private, transnational oligopolies. We describe this phenomenon as the ‘Metric Raj’. The evaluation of an Indian academic’s worth is no longer based on the quality of their teaching or the depth of their social engagement, but on their digital footprint in a proprietary database. 

These databases, however, are neither neutral nor holistic, and certainly not altruistic. They privilege English-language journal articles, reward quantity over rigour and serve commercial interests while presenting themselves as measures of scholarly excellence. This reflects globalisation’s impact on knowledge systems, with national academic authority increasingly influenced by foreign commercial entities in the name of international competitiveness.

The ‘Metric Raj’ represents a new form of colonisation, where the power to determine what counts as legitimate knowledge has been surrendered to algorithms accountable only to shareholders. 

For Indian Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), Scopus plays a central role in evaluation, with recruitment, promotion, funding and institutional rankings increasingly linked to metrics derived from this database.

This dependence has shaped research practices, influenced data reporting and affected the allocation of resources within the Indian research ecosystem. As policies like the National Education Policy (NEP), Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (RUSA) and others force Indian universities to chase global rankings, the measure has become the target, creating a culture in which students are viewed less as minds to be moulded and more as citations to be harvested.

To understand the pressures within Indian academia, it is useful to consider the role of RELX, the parent company of Elsevier, which describes itself as a “global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools.” 

The company’s model involves academics contributing research and peer review without direct compensation, while the published content is sold to universities and governments. In this system, knowledge production is intertwined with commercial interests and many academics work under increasingly precarious career conditions.

Institutions now pay more for bundled agreements with publishers than they once did for subscriptions. Authors face article processing charges (APCs) of up to $11,400 (over ten lakh rupees) and researchers from institutions without such agreements are increasingly excluded from publishing in prestigious journals.

Beyond this, there may be aspects of deeper colonisation at play. These proprietary databases increasingly influence what is considered recognised knowledge, fostering a Scopus-centric view, where works not indexed in Scopus may be perceived as less legitimate, less valuable or less widely acknowledged internationally.

This tendency risks marginalisation of journals from the Global South, indigenous knowledge systems, and non-English scholarship. 

Researcher Simon van Bellen and his team, in a paper published in arXIV found that when scholarly coverage expands beyond Scopus's curated corpus, the dominance of five major publishers drops from 59% to 37-38%. Google Scholar finds substantially more citations than any other database regardless of subject area. Dimensions include more than 147 million publications compared to Scopus's 90.6 million and incorporates clinical trials, grants, datasets, and policy documents, and provides significantly broader coverage of Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities. 

RELX has shifted its focus towards data-driven services. Indian universities engage with these services not only as consumers of scholarly content but also as participants in a system that tracks and evaluates academic outputs. Universities increasingly use data-driven tools, and administrative decisions are informed by insights generated from these systems.

Obsession with metrics

When high-stakes rewards are tied to a quantifiable metric, that metric ceases to be a reliable measure. In India, this sociological axiom is unfolding with alarming clarity with the rise of paper mills, citation manipulation and predatory publishing.

The obsession with commercially produced metrics has resulted in a fourfold drain on the scientific ecosystem, money, time, trust and control, placing a significant burden on national development. This gives rise to what may be called the ‘absent professor syndrome’, where faculty is physically present but intellectually absent, their attention consumed by the relentless demands of producing the next paper. 

Innovative teaching, which requires time, reflection and creativity yet yields no Academic Performance Indicators (API) points, is actively disincentivised. Universities are increasingly turning into research factories, where teachers paradoxically begin to view teaching as a secondary activity.

The aspiration to integrate Indian higher education into the global knowledge economy was indeed noble but the blind adoption of commercial metrics has turned into a Faustian bargain.

Colonial bureaucracy

The ‘Metric Raj’ operates as a system of control as effective as any colonial bureaucracy. It extracts wealth through APCs and subscriptions, imposes foreign standards and governs from a distant, unaccountable authority. Indian academia now sacrifices time, money and efforts to sustain this algorithmic apparatus.

While the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) was envisioned as an indigenous alternative against Western academic hegemony, it has instead internalised the neocolonial logic of the 'Metric Raj'. Rather than asserting pedagogical sovereignty, NIRF has integrated Scopus-derived metrics into the machinery of national governance, influencing research grant allocation, institutional autonomy, student loan eligibility and even bank lending criteria. 

Indian universities now find themselves trapped within concentric circles of commercial metrics, each layer appearing independently rational and domestically determined, yet all ultimately reinforcing subordination to foreign commercial databases.

The consequences have been catastrophic. NIRF’s integration of Scopus metrics has triggered what the framework itself acknowledges as a “dangerous race for quantity over quality.” India now ranks second globally in research retractions — a distinction achieved not through scholarly excellence, but through the systematic incentivisation of misconduct.

This shift represents a sophisticated form of self-colonisation. By embedding external metrics into national funding and grant allocation mechanisms, the Indian state has granted nationalist legitimacy to a subordinate position. 

The 'Metric Raj', operationalised through NIRF, has achieved what QS or Times Higher Education alone could not, the voluntary, enthusiastic self-enforcement of subordination by the very institutions being evaluated. This internalisation has fuelled a crisis of academic integrity, transforming the pursuit of knowledge into a high stakes hunt for volume, propelling India to the global summit of research retractions.

(Sushant Kishore teaches in Vellore Institute of Technology and Navneet Sharma teaches in Central University of Himachal Pradesh. Views are personal)