NIRF: Making It Robust, Relevant And Appropriate

- Prof.Sowmyanarayanam Sadagopan

National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) is the first un-biased ranking of higher education institutions in India, undertaken by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). Based on an Expert Committee recommendation of 2015, three annual rankings were made (2016, 2017 & 2018); the ranking for 2019 is underway. The ranking is based on five core criteria, namely:

Teaching/Learning;

Research /professional practice;

Graduation outcome;

Outreach/ inclusivity; and Perception

Objective in nature

Unlike many rankings undertaken mostly by media houses, NIRF is data-based and attempts to be as objective as possible. This is of value, considering the fact that until a few years back, many institute heads used to get a request from some of the media agencies for a fee running into several lakhs of rupees with an attachment that showed the front page of the magazine issue with the specific Institute ranked as No 1! With very large number of institutes in the country, ranking has become a difficult and often controversial exercise. NIRF too has its share of controversies, more due to inaccuracy of data than a flawed methodology.

Making ranking more robust

Three areas that need immediate attention are data collection, analysis and visualization.

DATA COLLECTION: A possible area that can be immediately addressed is a move towards automation of data gathering. Just as Google “crawls” data from websites or Reserve Bank of India consolidates data kept by the individual banks in XML format (thanks to core banking), MHRD can “crawl” data with clearly identified meta-data and data structures for storing the data in an ongoing basis; in turn, there will not be a need to “collect” data from thousands of individual institutions typically during September of every year.