How reliable are the rankings of India's top IITs and IIMs?

Every year, around the time when the new academic year begins, the ministry of education releases its annual rankings of government and private higher education institutions in the country. The rankings, which have been published since 2016, are calculated based on the government’s National Institutional Ranking Framework.

The rankings are published across different categories, including engineering, management, medicine and law. In each category, the ministry lists the 200 institutions that in its assessment are the best in the country that year.

The NIRF rankings are a crucial resource for millions of students who have to decide what institutions and programmes to seek admission in each year.

But are the rankings based on a rigorous methodology and consistent data?

This question came to fore last September when an employee of the Indian Institute of Management Mumbai alleged that the institute had inflated numbers pertaining to income, expenditure and faculty strength in the data it submitted to the NIRF. Scroll cross-checked these claims by sourcing data that the institute had submitted to the NIRF, as well as the data published in its annual reports, and found that there were indeed significant discrepancies between the two. Neither the institute nor the ministry of education had responded to Scroll’s requests for comment.

However, the case highlighted one of the fault lines...

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