NIRF National Institutional Ranking Framework

The National Institutional Ranking Framework or NIRF came into existence, in the year 2015, on 29th September. It was approved by the Ministry of Human Resources Development and comprises a methodology to rank all the institutions in India. The rankings are made based on the understandings and recommendations of a core committee set up by the MHRD. They have certain broad parameters set up for ranking the institutions and the universities. The parameters broadly come under the categories of teaching, research and professional practices, learning and resources, outreach and inclusivity, graduation outcomes and perception. Every large institution is given a common overall rank as well as a rank, specific to the subjects taught. The parameters, on which the rankings are based, can be discussed in detail.

Under teaching, learning and resources, the sub parameters are total budget and its allocation, strength of the students including the doctoral students, faculty-student ratio with permanent faculty as the core focus and combined metric for faculties having a PhD and Experience. Similarly there are several other sub parameters for all the other parameters mentioned.

There are separate rankings for every type of institutions depending on the areas they operate. The institutions can be universities and colleges, management institutions, engineering institutions, architecture institutions and pharmacy institutions. The parameters used for ranking them are grouped into five clusters, attached to certain weightages, which again depend on the type of the institution. The first round of rankings received the voluntary participation of 3500 institutions.

A suitable metric is proposed by the core committee which calculates a score under each subheading. These scores are then added to obtain the scores for each individual head. The overall scores take the maximum value as 100. The institutions are classified under two categories, category A institutions and category B institutions, based on the overall scores.