India’s premier institutes like the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) are the most sought after institutes in the country that attract the best of the talent from across the country. But how do these national institutes compare with those in Singapore, a major hub of education in Asia? A new study by researchers from the Vidya Academy of Science and Technology, Thrissur and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Technological University, Thiruvananthapuram, throws some light on this by considering the performance of IISc and 7 IITs and comparing it with the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. The researchers used data from a publicly available website (http://www.excellencemapping.net/#/view/measure/top10/calculation/a_ohn…) based on the research output of these institutes during the five-year publication window 2008–12. They then devised a three-dimensional evaluation approach by taking into account three factors -- size, excellence and diversity of research in these institutes. The study finds that the NUS + NTU cluster outperforms the IISc + 7 IITs cluster on all the three counts since the research base in NUS+NTU is larger, it produces work which is uniformly of higher quality and is structurally more diverse than the IISc+IIT cluster.