"We lost out primarily due to our faculty-student ratio where we were 8th in the list and this had high weightage. We have 11,300 plus students, by far the largest," IIT-Kgp Director Partha Pratim Chakraborty said.
"In all other areas our performance was very close to the top," he said.
"However, I think we must not only increase faculty base though we are growing at a high rate, it is not easy to get the quality faculty we need. We must make more effective use of our large student strength at all levels as an asset for growing the research quality output," he said.
IIT Madras and IIT Bombay are the two top technological institutes in the country, according to the first ever domestic ranking released by the government today.
IIT Kharagpur is third followed by IIT Delhi and IIT Kanpur.