NIRF 2025: IIT Madras ranks best in Overall, Engineering, SDGs and Innovation categories

NIRF Rankings 2025 | Overall Category | Engineering Colleges | Top Universities | Top Colleges | Top MBA Colleges | Law | State Public Universities | Medical | Research |

Among universities, IISc retained the top spot for the tenth year in a row. JNU retained its second rank from last year. Delhi University climbed up a position to fifth.

BITS Pilani entered the top 10 in the universities category (up from 19 last year) for the first time since 2016, when it was ranked ninth.

Among colleges, Hindu College and Miranda House continued to retain the top two ranks. Hansraj College and Kirori Mal College stood third and fourth, respectively — their best performance in the 10 editions of the rankings so far. Hansraj College ranked 12th last year, while Kirori Mal College ranked ninth. They performed better than St. Stephen’s College this year, which was ranked fifth, down from third last year. Lady Shri Ram College for Women, ranked tenth last year, fell to the 17th position this year.

In the 2018 edition of the rankings, Hansraj College ranked 21st and Kirori Mal 20th. 

Hindu College had pipped Miranda House to the top rank in this category last year — Miranda House had retained the first position for seven years before that.

Institutions are evaluated on groups of parameters: teaching, learning and resources (TLR), which includes student enrolment and faculty-student ratio; research and professional practice (RP), including publications and research projects; graduation outcomes (GO), including placements and PhD students who have graduated; outreach and inclusivity (OI), referring to diversity among students; and perception (PR) among academic peers and employers.

IIT Madras has a full score of 100 in the perception category — the only such institution in the top 10 of the overall category. It has been scoring 100 on this parameter since 2023. IIT Madras also fared better than the other institutions in the top 10 on the teaching, learning and resources parameter, where it scored 90.58. The lowest score that IIT Madras has is on the outreach and inclusivity parameter — 63.34. 

Among the colleges in the top 10 ranks — of which six are Delhi University institutions — Hans Raj College and Atma Ram Sanatan Dharma College have the highest scores in the research and professional practice parameter, with each college scoring a little over 96. In comparison, Hindu College, which ranked first in the colleges category, scored 66.92 on this parameter, but fared better on perception (96.08 vs 76.81 for Hans Raj College, and 47.98 for Atma Ram Sanatan Dharma College). 

Among the top 10 universities, second-ranked JNU saw the highest score in graduation outcomes — 99.93. It saw the lowest score among the top 10 universities on the research and professional practice parameter — 45.59. IISc, which was ranked first in this category, saw the highest score among the top 10 ranks on the teaching, learning and resources parameter (86.47), and on perception (98.89). Of the institutions in the top 10 positions, IISc saw the second lowest score of 60.29 on the outreach and inclusivity parameter, after Jadavpur University’s 52.34. 

This year’s edition of the rankings saw around 7,692 participating institutions, up from 2,426 institutions in the first edition in 2016.

Institutions were ranked in a total of 17 categories this year, up from 16 last year. Apart from the overall ranking and rankings of universities and colleges, engineering, medical, dental, law, and management institutions, the new category this year is for sustainable development goals.  This evaluates institutions on the basis of their “green” practices.

In the engineering and management categories, IIT Madras and IIM Ahmedabad retained their top ranks. IIT Madras also ranked first in the innovation and sustainable development goals categories. The institute’s Director Prof V Kamakoti attributed the consistent top rank to “focused team effort”.

Anil D. Sahasrabudhe, Chairman, National Board of Accreditation, said the retraction of research papers has been a challenge, and this time, negative marking has been introduced for retracted papers for the first time.