The National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) is a methodology adopted by the Ministry of Education, Government of India, to rank institutions of higher education in India. The Framework was approved by the MHRD and launched by Minister of Human Resource Development on 29 September 2015.[1] 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.[2] 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 weightages. The weightages depend on the type of institution. About 3500 institutions voluntarily participated in the first round of rankings.[3]
NIRF was allotted a budget of ₹3 crore (US$400,000)[4] for 2021-22.
The 2017 ranked lists were released by MHRD on 3 April 2017.[5] 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.[6]
On April 3, 2018, the 2018 NIRF rankings were released which witnessed an increase in the number of participating institutions.[7]
The NIRF ranking for 2019 was released on April 8, 2019 in 9 categories which included Overall, Universities, Engineering, Colleges, Management, Pharmacy, Medical, Architecture, and Law.[8]
The Good part of this evaluation is it gives an opportunity to student’s to understand the college preferences and helps them prepare for the college they are interested in, in advance as there are further processes involved in getting admission to the colleges with higher rankings.
While the NIRF rankings is a recent concept and has just come into recognition in the last few year, since 2020 the rankings do not hold much relevance as it is difficult to measure a few parameter in the digitally focused education system.
NIRF rankings don’t do complete evaluations and honestly, NIRF rankings are false. I was surprised to see many colleges and universities rank way above some of the premier and established colleges of the country.
For examples :
• BITS Pilani ranks below New IITs, JamiaMilliaIslamia, NIT Nagpur, Amrita School of Engineering, Anna University and the likes. BITS Pilani is a college of that level which successfully competes with the top 5 IITs of the country. There is no way NITs or other private colleges can rank above BITS-Pilani.
• IIIT Hyderabad which is brand in itself when it comes to top CSE educational institutes of the country gets a rank of 43 and who all are above it : KIIT Odisha, NIT Kurukshetra, SASTRA Tamil Nadu, Amity University Noida. I simply can’t believe as to how these NITs, other private institutes like SASTRA, Amity etc. where TCS and Infosys hires in huge chunks, can rank above IIIT-H. Completely Illogical and makes no sense to me.
I remember few years ago, I saw some govt. rankings where they didn’t include IIITH, IIITD and BITS-Pilani. However other shitty private colleges were mentioned in top ranks and that was some central university ranking framework. Hence, since then I have stopped looking at these govt. framework rankings of Indian colleges and advise others as well to stop taking these rankings seriously as true parameters are never evaluated in real.
However if we go by the latest NIRF ranking the top 5 institutes of the country are as mentioned below:
Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
While the NIRF ranking has been made very critical for institutes, there are many institutes which are running successfully without NIRF evaluation as It might just to an institute’s value but is not critically mandatory.