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Vice Chancellor V Ram Gopal Rao of BITS Pilani Group said that the National Institutional Ranking structure of the Ministry of Education has come a long way since its inception and is offering a reliable option for the ranking by foreign private agencies.
However, he believes that the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) ranking system still faces some challenges that need to be addressed.
“The big win is that NIRF is announced by the Government of India. It has official sanctity. QS or Times are higher education rankings private agencies and keep the perception so much because it is their business model, and you can hire them for those services,” Rao said.
He told PTI in an interview, “NIRF has come a long way in the last 10 years about how it has developed and some of them are capable of strengthening the matrix. It has been said that, there are still a lot of challenges.”
Vice Chancellor of BITS Pilani Group said that he feels that NIRF needs to be much stronger to participate in NIRF with over 14,000 individual institutions and to rank by the Government of India, which is used for funding and other things.
The 10th edition of Nirf was announced on 4 September.
Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, first entered the rankings of the top 10 universities, fining seventh. The institution has improved from 26 to 23 in its overall rankings, and the ranking between engineering institutions has seen a big jump from 20th place to 11th place this year.
Bits have also been ranked second in pharmacy institutions.
Rao, who was previously the director of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Deli, suggested that the matrix needs some changes to be able to rate the institutions properly to evaluate research.
“The first thing is about research … if you look at research parameters, about 21 percent are for ranking research, whether it is the number of papers or quotes.
“I recently saw a very interesting trends in a scientific paper … track the number of papers and quotes, one on one, meaning that if you plot on the number of papers and quotes on one axis on one axis, it is a straight line,” he said.
In detail, Rao said that it essentially means that people who are writing more papers are essentially citing themselves.
“Either their institutions are citing it or they are quoting it themselves. There are many self-conscious problems that are happening due to this. And when a metric is keeping an eye on one, quotation, research quantity, count it twice, for a day, for a day, …. I think it is a double-consumption phenomenon,” He said.
Rao also said for the audit, if an institution shows an important jump, as the ranking depends on self-reported data.
A lot of audit is needed. We need to ensure that randomly we audit institutions that are showing significant improvements … This instability is actually a major challenge in NIRF. In addition to the top 20, the remaining banks have a major instability.
“If someone has shown a significant jump, some data should be audited at regular intervals. It will determine a fear … self-reported data, I believe, a great concern because sometimes the results coming out of it are unexpected and do not reflect the reality on the ground,” he said.
Higher education institutions (HEI) participation in Nirf rankings increased from 3,565 to 14,163 in 2025 in 2016. Concurrently, the number of categories and subject domains has increased from four to 1725 in 2016 to 17.
The 10th edition of the ranking evaluated higher education institutions in nine categories – overall, universities, colleges, research institutes, innovation, open universities, state public universities, skills universities and sustainable development goals (SDG).
Hei has also been ranked in eight subject domains – engineering, management, pharmacy, law, medicine, architecture and also in planning, dentistry and agriculture and allied sectors.
A record number of 7,692 unique institutions responded and submitted 14,163 applications to various categories and subject domains, introduced themselves to rankings in ‘composite’, category-specific or domain-specific rankings.
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