National Institutional Ranking Framework

National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) is a ranking methodology released annually by the Ministry of Education, Government of India, to rank institutions of higher education in India. The framework was approved by the former Ministry of Human Resource Development (now the Ministry of Education) and launched by the Minister on 29 September 2015.

National Institutional Ranking Framework

Categories	Higher education
Frequency	Annual
Publisher	Ministry of Education
First issue	2016
Country	India
Website	nirfindia.org

Depending on their areas of operation, institutions have been ranked under 11 different categories – overall, university, colleges, engineering, management, pharmacy, law, medical, architecture, dental and research. The Framework uses several parameters for ranking purposes like resources, research, and stakeholder perception. These parameters have been grouped into five clusters and these clusters were assigned certain weights. These weights depend on the type of institution. About 3500 institutions voluntarily participated in the first round of rankings.

Background

The 2017 rankings were released by MHRD on 3 April 2017. While in its first rankings released in 2016, NIRF had four categories (Universities, Engineering, Management and Pharmacy), in 2017, two more categories namely, Overall and College, were added. Around 3,000 institutions participated in the rankings.

On 3 April 2018, the 2018 NIRF rankings were released with an increased number of participating institutions over the previous year.

The 2019 NIRF ranking was released on 8 April 2019 in 9 categories: Overall, Universities, Engineering, Colleges, Management, Pharmacy, Medical, Architecture, and Law.

For the 2020 rankings, around 3,800 institutions participated in the process, a 20% increase over 2019. The 2020 ranked lists were released by MHRD on 11 June 2020. For the first time, dental institutes were placed in a new category.

Formation

MHRD organized a one-day workshop on 21 August 2014 on evolving methodologies for the ranking of institutions of higher education in India. The meeting resolved to establish a committee for building a national ranking framework. Later it was also decided to appoint representatives of central universities for the proposed committee. Based on these decisions, a core committee consisting of 16 members was constituted on 29 October 2014 with secretary (HE, MHRD, as chairperson and additional secretary (TE), MHRD, as member-secretary. The other members were the vice-chancellors of Delhi University, EFL University, Central University of Gujarat and JNU, the directors of the IIT Kharagpur, IIT Madras, IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore, NIT Tiruchirappalli, NIT Warangal, IIIT&M Gwalior, IISER Bhopal, SPA Delhi, NAAC, and chairperson of NBA.

The terms of reference of the committee were:

• Suggest a National Framework for performance measurement and ranking of

1. Institutions;
2. Programmes;

• Suggest the organizational structure, institutional mechanism and processes for implementation along with time-lines of the National Ranking Framework.

1. Suggest a mechanism for financing of the Scheme on National Ranking Framework.
2. Suggest linkages with National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) and National Board of Accreditation (NBA), if any.

The core committee identified a set of measurable parameters to be used as metrics for ranking the institutions. These parameters were grouped into five major headings. The committee suggested the weightages to be assigned to various groups of parameters in the case of institutions of engineering education and left the task of carrying out similar exercises for institutions of other disciplines to other competent agencies. The initial draft of the report was prepared by Surendra Prasad, chairman, National Board of Accreditation and Member of the core committee.

The University Grants Commission constituted an expert committee on 9 October 2015 to develop a framework for the ranking of universities and colleges in India and the framework developed by this expert committee has been incorporated into NIRF. The core committee also suggested a framework for ranking institutions offering management education also. The All India Council for Technical Education developed parameters and metrics for ranking institutions offering pharmacy education and also architecture education.

Recommendations of the core committee

The following are some of the recommendations of the core committee:

• The metrics for ranking of engineering institutions should be based on the parameters agreed upon by the core committee.
• The parameters have been organized into five broad heads or groups and each group has been divided into suitable sub-groups. Each broad head has an overall weight assigned to it. Within each head, the sub-heads should also have appropriate weight distributions.
• A suitable metric has been proposed which computes a score under each sub-head. The sub-head scores are then added to obtain scores for each individual head. The overall score is computed-based on the weights allotted to each head. The overall score can take a maximum value of 100.
• The committee recommended the classification of institutions into two categories:

• Category A institutions: These are institutions of national importance set up by Acts of Parliament, State Universities, Deemed-to-be Universities, Private Universities and other autonomous institutions.
• Category B institutions: These are institutions affiliated to a University and do not enjoy full academic autonomy.

Parameters and their weightages

Engineering, management, pharmacy and architecture institutions

The approved set of parameter groups and the weightages assigned to them in respect of institutions offering programmes in engineering, management, pharmacy and architecture are given in the following table.

Parameters	Category A institutions	Category B institutions
Teaching, learning and resources (TLR)	0.30	0.30
Research, professional practice and collaborative performance (RPC)	0.30	0.20
Graduation outcome (GO)	0.15	0.25
Outreach and inclusivity (OI)	0.15	0.15
Perception (PR)	0.10	0.10

Overall and colleges

The approved set of parameter groups and the weightages assigned to them in respect of overall rating and for colleges are given in the following table, for 2018.

Parameters	Overall	Colleges
Teaching, learning and resources (TLR)	0.30	0.40
Research, productivity, impact and IPR (RPII)	0.30	0.15
Graduation outcome (GO)	0.20	0.25
Outreach and inclusivity (OI)	0.10	0.10
Perception (PR)	0.10	0.10

Latest Ranking - 2024

Overall (Top 10)

Rank	Name	City	State/UT	NIRF Score	Institutional classification
1	Indian Institute of Technology Madras	Chennai	Tamil Nadu	86.42	Public
2	Indian Institute of Science	Bengaluru	Karnataka	83.28	Public
3	Indian Institute of Technology Bombay	Mumbai	Maharashtra	81.37	Public
4	Indian Institute of Technology Delhi	Delhi	Delhi	80.31	Public
5	Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur	Kanpur	Uttar Pradesh	77.56	Public
6	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Kharagpur	West Bengal	74.77	Public
7	All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi	New Delhi	Delhi	74.27	Public
8	Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee	Roorkee	Uttarakhand	71.52	Public
9	Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati	Guwahati	Assam	69.04	Public
10	Jawaharlal Nehru University	New Delhi	Delhi	68.53	Public

Medical (Top 10)

Rank	Name	City	State/UT	NIRF Score	Institutional classification
1	AIIMS, New Delhi	New Delhi	Delhi	94.46	Public
2	PGIMER, Chandigarh	Chandigarh	Chandigarh	80.83	Public
3	Christian Medical College, Vellore	Vellore	Tamil Nadu	75.11	Private
4	National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences	Bengaluru	Karnataka	71.92	Public
5	JIPMER, Pondicherry	Pondicherry	Puducherry	70.74	Public
6	Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences	Lucknow	Uttar Pradesh	70.07	Public
7	Banaras Hindu University	Varanasi	Uttar Pradesh	69.54	Public
8	Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham	Coimbatore	Tamil Nadu	68.81	Private
9	Kasturba Medical College	Manipal	Karnataka	67.42	Private
10	Madras Medical College and Government General Hospital	Chennai	Tamil Nadu	64.12	Public

Engineering (Top 10)

Rank	Name	City	State/UT	NIRF Score	Institutional classification
1	IIT Madras	Chennai	Tamil Nadu	89.46	Public
2	IIT Delhi	Delhi	Delhi	86.66	Public
3	IIT Bombay	Mumbai	Maharashtra	83.09	Public
4	IIT Kanpur	Kanpur	Uttar Pradesh	82.79	Public
5	IIT Kharagpur	Kharagpur	West Bengal	76.88	Public
6	IIT Roorkee	Roorkee	Uttarakhand	76.00	Public
7	IIT Guwahati	Guwahati	Assam	71.86	Public
8	IIT Hyderabad	Hyderabad	Telangana	71.55	Public
9	National Institute of Technology, Trichy	Tiruchirapalli	Tamil Nadu	66.88	Public
10	Indian Institute of Technology (BHU)	Varanasi	Uttar Pradesh	66.69	Public

Universities (Top 10)

Rank	Name	City	State	NIRF Score	Institutional classification
1	Indian Institute of Science	Bengaluru	Karnataka	83.29	Public
2	Jawaharlal Nehru University	New Delhi	Delhi	69.80	Public
3	Jamia Millia Islamia	New Delhi	Delhi	68.11	Public
4	Manipal Academy of Higher Education-Manipal	Manipal	Karnataka	67.18	Private
5	Banaras Hindu University	Varanasi	Uttar Pradesh	66.05	Public
6	Delhi University	New Delhi	Delhi	65.90	Public
7	Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham	Coimbatore	Tamil Nadu	65.73	Private
8	Aligarh Muslim University	Aligarh	Uttar Pradesh	65.57	Public
9	Jadavpur University	Kolkata	West Bengal	65.39	Public
10	Vellore Institute of Technology	Vellore	Tamil Nadu	64.79	Private

Law (Top 5 )

Rank	Name	City	State
1	National Law School of India University	Bengaluru	Karnataka
2	National Law University	New Delhi	Delhi
3	NALSAR University of Law	Hyderabad	Telangana
4	The West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences	Kolkata	West Bengal
5	Symbiosis Law School	Pune	Maharashtra

Criticism

The rankings have been criticized as manipulative by students and some academics. In spite of the criticism, the government has done little to modify the methodologies or results of the rankings. The list was criticized for being incomplete and incoherent in 2017. Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi raised objection on 2017 NIRF ranking, accusing it of being based on incomplete data.

In 2021, Professor Anil Kumar Tripathi, director of the Institute of Science, Banaras Hindu University criticized the NIRF University rankings, accusing it to compare institutions with same budget but varying number of students. He said that "IISc no doubt, is the top institution in the country. Banaras Hindu University (BHU), however, is a different kind of educational institution. Both institutions have almost the same budget but the same amount of money caters to a large number of students, teachers and infrastructure at BHU. In comparison to IISc the money available is about five to ten times lesser in our university because of the sheer size".

See also

• National Skill Development Agency
• National Education Policy 2020
• Skill India