IIT Madras retains top spot as India's best institute in NIRF Rankings

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras retained the top spot as India's best institute in both the 'Overall' and 'Engineering' categories in the latest National Institutional Rankings Framework (NIRF) 2020 announced by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) virtually on Thursday.

This is the second consecutive year that IIT Madras, identified as an 'Institute of Eminence', has bagged the top spot in the overall category and fifth in the engineering category.

IIT Madras is followed by Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru, IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay and IIT Kharagpur, which retained their second, third, fourth and fifth ranks, respectively, as last year. Union Minister of Human Resource Development Ramesh Pokhriyal said that  going forward, the MHRD will create an enabling situation where institutes from across the world will want to be part of the Indian NIRF Rankings.

Institutes like IISc, IIT Madras and IIM Ahmedabad claimed the top spots in other categories such as universities, and engineering and management institutes. The other top four institutions ranked in the university category included Jawaharlal Nehru University, Banaras Hindu University, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham and Jadavpur University, while in the engineering category, the likes of IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur, and IIT Kharagpur claimed the top five spots.

In the management category, IIM Ahmedabad improved its position from the second spot in 2019 to the top spot in 2020, pipping IIM Bangalore, which took the second rank, followed by IIM Calcutta, IIM Lucknow and IIT Kharagpur.

Bhaskar Ramamurthi, director of IIT Madras, said that the institute had drawn up a strategic plan and executed it to achieve rapid strides in various sub-parameters of NIRF Rankings such as qualified and experienced faculty, student-faculty ratio, industrial consultancy and sponsored research, placement and higher educational opportunities for its students, quality of research publications and so on.

Similarly, with IIT Guwahati improving its ranking in the overall category from the ninth position in 2019 to the seventh spot in 2020, the institute's director T G Sitharam said that the main reason behind the improvement in rankings in both the categories was the strong growth seen across three parameters including research and professional practice (RPC), graduation outcomes (GO) and perception.

The ranking framework evaluates institutions on five broad groups of parameters, i.e. teaching, learning and resources (TLR), research and professional practice (RP), graduation outcomes (GO), outreach and inclusivity (OI) and perception (PR). Ranks are assigned based on the total marks assigned for each of these five broad groups of parameters.

Number of institutions participating in NIRF 2020 rankings for overall and other categories rose by 20% to stand at 3,771 this year as compared to 3,127 last year, with 5,805 applications as against 4,873 in 2019, MHRD said on Thursday. "Number of unique applicants to India rankings have increased from 3,127 in 2019 to 3,771 in 2020, whereas the total number of applications for ranking in various categories have increased from 4,873 in 2019, to 5,805 in 2020, a total increase of 644 unique institutions and 932 total applicants," the ministry stated.

Along with 9 categories including overall, university, engineering, management, colleges, medical, pharmacy, architecture and law, MHRD also added a new category of dental colleges in the NIRF 2020 rankings.

Top five institutions in the colleges category were led by Miranda House, Delhi, with first rank, followed by Lady Shri Ram College for Women, New Delhi, Hindu College, Delhi, St. Stephen's College, Delhi, and Presidency College, Chennai. Pharmacy college rankings were led by the likes of Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi, Panjab University, Chandigarh, NIPER Mohali, ICT Mumbai and NIPER Hyderabad, respectively.

While AIIMS New Delhi, Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) Chandigarh and CMC Vellore formed the top three institutes in medical category, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Roorkee and NIT Calicut took the top three spots in the architecture category. NLSIU, Bengaluru, NLU, New Delhi and Nalsar University of Law, Hyderabad were the top three law institutions in NIRF 2020, while Maulana Azad Institute of Dental Sciences, Delhi, Manipal College of Dental Sciences, Udupi and Dr D Y Patil Vidyapeeth, Pune were the top three dental colleges.

Apart from sourcing data on various parameters from applicant institutions, third party sources of data were also used, wherever possible. Scopus (Elsevier Science) and Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics) were used for retrieving publications and citations data. Derwent Innovation was used for retrieving data on patents. Data retrieved from these sources was shared with the institutions for transparency with a provision to give their inputs.

As a matter of practice, 200 institutions are ranked in the engineering discipline, 100 institutions are ranked in overall, university and college categories, 75 each in management and pharmacy, 40 in medical and 20 each in architecture and law. Thirty institutions were ranked in the dental category for the first time.