There are many opportunities and challenges in the area of Indian technical education due to liberalization and globalization of economy. One of these challenges is how to assess the performance of technical institutions based on multiple criteria. The purpose of this paper is to describe and illustrate an application of a structured approach to determine relative performance and ranking of seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) under multi-criteria environment. To evaluate the alternatives in respect to stakeholders’ preference we suggest a new methodology consisting of fuzzy AHP, DEA and TOPSIS. Fuzzy AHP technique is used to determine the weights of criteria and some linguistic terms are applied to assess performance under each criterion, then in order to determine the value of linguistic terms we use the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method. Finally TOPSIS method is used to aggregate performance scores under different criteria into an overall performance score for each institution and ranking the institution according to their overall performance score. The proposed fuzzy AHP–DEA–TOPSIS methodology is applicable to any multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) problem due to its generic nature.