The Indian Institute of Technology’s (IIT) are autonomous public institutions of higher education, offering undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral courses in engineering and related domains. IIT Kharagpur was the first institute to be set up, followed by in Bombay, Madras, Kanpur and Delhi. Today, there are a total of 23 IIT’s across the country and many of these premier institutions are placed high up in institutional rankings in the country. On the international stage however, the institution often ranked much lower, as seen in the 2015 Academic Ranking of World Universities, where none of the IIT’s were listed in the top 500 ranked Universities. Now researchers from South Asian University, New Delhi and Banaras Hindu University have assessed 16 of the 23 institutions for their research performance and compared it to two high ranking universities – Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which could provide possible directions for improvements. The researchers looked at various aspects productivity per capita, rate of growth of research output, authorship and collaborations, citation impact and the discipline wise strengths. Although IIT Kharagpur leads the group in research productivity and citation impact, IIT Bombay fared well in other factors like International collaboration and rate of growth. Of the new IIT’s, IIT Indore and Bhubaneswar fared well, while compared to the others but did not perform very well on the overall ranking scheme. The final ranking placed IIT Bombay at first place followed by IIT Delhi and Gurgaon. Although statistically, the age of the institutions plays a role in the quality of research and their ranking, NTU which was set up much more recently than most new IIT’s is already placed as one of world’s leading institutions, showing that age does not affect the quality of an institution. The new study could open new doors to bring our country’s premier institutions-- the IIT’s, up to international educational standards.