A framework to measure relative performance of Indian technical institutions using integrated fuzzy AHP and COPRAS methodology Manik Chandra Das a, * , Bijan Sarkar b , Siddhartha Ray c a Automobile Engineering Department, MCKV Institute of Engineering, 243 GT Road (N), Liluah, Howrah 711204, India b Production Engineering Department, Jadavpur University, Kolkata 700032, India c Mechanical Engineering Department, Heritage Institute of Technology, Kolkata 700107, India article info Article history: Available online 20 December 2011 Keywords: Performance evaluation Fuzzy AHP COPRAS Ranking abstract There are many opportunities and challenges in area of Indian technical education due to liberalization and globalization of economy. One of these challenges is how to assess performance of technical insti- tutions based on multiple criteria. This paper is focused on performance evaluation and ranking of seven Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) in respect to stakeholders’ preference using an integrated model consisting of fuzzy AHP and COPRAS. Findings based on 2007e2008 data show that performance of two IITs need considerable improvement. To the best of our knowledge it is one of few studies that evaluates performance of technical institutions in India. Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction To make India a knowledge based society the most important area that needs to be addressed first is education. No society or no nation can be developed without proper education. As envisaged by Indian erudite scholars around 1000 years ago, education is a never ending journey from less light to more light (Tamaso Ma Jyotirgamaya). Education is the manifestation of perfections already in man. Indian technical education system is one of the largest educational systems in the world. Engineering education in India started during the British colonial rule and it focused mainly on civil engineering. Gradually few engineering colleges namely the Engineering College at Roorkee, Poona Civil Engineering College at Pune, Bengal Engineering College at Shibpur, etc., came up in the mid-1850s. Presently, the technical education system in the country can be broadly classified into three categories like, Central Government funded institutions, State Government/State funded institutions and Self-financed institutions. In 2007e2008, there were 52 centrally funded institutions (CFI) of technical and science education. The breakup of these 52 institutions is fur- nished in Table 1 . These institutions function following the guidelines stipulated by All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and the Council of architecture. As of now 2300 engi- neering colleges are running in India and 600,000 students are passing out in each year [9]. In the list of the best technical institutes in India, the first name comes into sight is a group of institutions called Indian Institute of Technology (IITs). The purpose of this paper is to assess the relative performance of these IITs based on multiple criteria. In this paper, we have considered seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) located at Kharagpur, Bombay, Madras, Kanpur, Delhi, Guwahati and Roorkee for study and these are coded as A, B, C, D, E, F and G respectively. These institutions are declared as “institutions of national importance”. The main objective of IITs is to impart world class education in engineering and technology, to conduct research in the relevant field, and to further advancement of learning and dissemination of knowledge. As the uniform quality output has become the prime concern today, therefore, performance evaluation and ranking of these technical institutions have become a research issue. All the stakeholders want to get optimum benefits at shortest period of time and at an economical cost to improve the quality of life. Therefore, this is the high time to do the performance evaluation of the technical institutions. In the literature lot of research works that deal with the performance evaluation of academic institu- tions worldwide have been reported in the last thirty years. Several approaches have been applied for this purpose like performance indicators, parametric methods (such as ordinary least square method, stochastic frontier method) and non- parametric method e such as various data envelopment analysis * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ91 3326549315; fax: þ91 3326549318. E-mail addresses: cd_manik@rediffmail.com (M.C. Das), bijon_sarkar@email. com (B. Sarkar), raysiddhartha@yahoo.com (S. Ray). Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Socio-Economic Planning Sciences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/seps 0038-0121/$ e see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.seps.2011.12.001 Socio-Economic Planning Sciences 46 (2012) 230e241