This research is part of our effort in trying to understand the higher education ecosystem in India with a special focus on institutions that have excelled in certain dimensions. The Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) had been set up after India’s independence with the objective of laying a strong foundation for engineering / technical education in India. During the last decade, IIT Bombay (in Mumbai) has established itself as a leading institute among the IITs. Not only have they risen rapidly in national and international rankings, close to 75% of students among the top 100 in the IIT-JEE merit list prefer to join IIT Bombay. Anectodical evidence indicates that faculty members from IIT Bombay, especially those with background in Computer Science and Electronics are in great demand from leading IT organizations such as Google and Microsoft as advisers and research collaborators.  Through our research we would like to understand the practices and measures that IIT Bombay had adopted that resulted in their ascendancy towards global recognition and thereby surpassing their peer group. Insights thus obtained would help to disseminate best practices that may be adopted by other similar institutes to create positive impact on the higher education ecosystem in India.