NIRF Rankings Out: IIT Madras at top for 6th year, IISc best university for 9th time

In the universities list, however, IISc has emerged at the top yet again — a position it has held since 2016, when the first edition of the NIRF rankings was released. While Delhi University has improved from the 11th spot to the sixth, the University of Hyderabad has slipped from10th to 17th spot.

Only three private institutions — the Manipal Academy of Higher Education, the Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, and the Vellore Institute of Technology — are among the top 10 universities, just like last year.

“Publicly funded institutions, including CFTIs (centrally funded technical institutes) and centrally funded universities, dominate the top ranks across most categories,” noted the report on the rankings, announced by Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

Among engineering colleges, while IIT Madras has retained its position as the top all through the nine NIRF editions, in the list of research institutions this year, it stands second after IISc.

Said IIT Madras Director Professor V Kamakoti: “Unlike IISc, we are a more teaching oriented institution. IISc is more research oriented. If I want to compete with IISc on the research front, I have to reduce the teaching load of the faculty and that will happen only if I have more faculty. We are now on a very big recruitment spree. We want to recruit more people so that the (faculty-student) ratio is 1:10. We are now somewhere at 1:14.”

Under the NIRF, institutions are evaluated on five groups of parameters: Teaching, Learning and Resources (TLR), which includes faculty-student ratio, faculty with PhD, and, this year, the introduction of courses on the Indian knowledge systems; Research and Professional Practice (RP); Graduation Outcome (GO); Outreach and Inclusivity (OI), and Perception (PR).

Among the top 10 in the universities category, JNU scored the lowest in the Research and Professional Practice parameter (45.27/ 100), while IISc scored the highest (86.5/ 100). “It was observed that faculty with doctoral qualification is concentrated in the top 100 institutions, the remaining institutions have fewer faculty with doctoral degrees”. “This is a serious handicap since mentorship received during the doctoral training as Teaching Assistant can play a vital role in preparing the faculty for a teaching career in higher education,” the report said.

Among the top 100 institutions, the report said, “faculty with PhD vary from minimum of 62.98% in case of ‘college’ category to the maximum of 93.45% in case of management institutions”. “Whereas faculty with PhD in remaining institutions vary from minimum of 32.30% in case of pharmacy institutions to the maximum of 67.55% in case of universities,” it added.

This year, institutions were ranked in 16 categories, three more than last year. The new categories were: open universities, state public universities and skill universities. For the rankings, 10,845 applications were received from 6,517 institutions.

Pointing out that a key aspect of the NEP 2020 is accreditation and ranking, Pradhan appealed to “all 58,000 institutions” to participate in the NIRF ranking process.