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It may have dropped one notch from last year, but Delhi University among the world's top 20 institutions for development studies.

In the QS World University Rankings by Subject to be released on Tuesday , DU occupies the 18th spot in the category of development studies, the highest achieved by an Indian varsity in the sixth edition of the subject-focused listings. The Indian Institutes of Technology , however, continue to be the most ranked Indian institutions, with IIT-Bombay featuring 14 times in the rankings and seven times among the top 100.

The ranking were based on the expert opinion of 76,798 academics and 44,426 employers along with the analysis of 28.5 million research papers and over 113 million citations sourced from the Scopus Elsevier bibliometric database.

IIT-B is the country's pre-eminent university at the subject level, featuring in 14 subject tables, the most successful among the 21 Indian universities ranked in at least one subject. DU stands at 18 in development studies, while IITDelhi is in 45th place in the electrical and electronics engineering list. The Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, weighs in at 47th for materials science.

The Indian universities occupy 114 places among them, an increase from the 107 in 2015. However, given QS's decision to continue expanding their rankings and make this year's edition its most inclusive ever, India's share of places as a proportion drops marginally from 1.29% to 1.25%.

Ben Sowter, head of the QS Intelligence Unit, said: "Though the US and UK remain dominant, our most inclusi ve rankings ever show that excellence can be found in an ever-increasing number of places. Nations like Austria, South Africa, Finland, Brazil, China, and Sweden can be found in the top ten of our tables. Our new top 100 for performing arts acknowledges academic ex cellence in 27 different countries, while our top 100 for mineral engineering recognizes it in 26." Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology continue to dominate global rankings, each taking 12 leading positions among 24 subjects.

"The QS World University Rankings by Subject shines a light on the excellence of institutions that cannot be included in the overall world ranking due to their specialist focus," pointed out Dr Karthick Sridhar, vice-chairman, Indian Centre for Academic Rankings and Excellence. He added, "President Pranab Mukherjee, in the capacity of Visitor to central universities, has encouraged the institutions to proactively engage with ranking agencies and provide the required data for global benchmar king initiatives."