Continuing its reign as the best higher education institution in the country, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Madras has secured the top spot for the fifth consecutive year in the latest national rankings released by the Minister of State for Education, Rajkumar Ranjan Singh, this week.

The latest edition of the National Institute Ranking Framework (NIRF) revealed no major upsets in terms of the results, with the IITs continuing their dominance in most categories. IIT-Madras also bagged the first position in engineering for the eighth year in a row and was assessed as the second-best research institution in the country, narrowly missing the top spot by 2.2 marks, which was claimed by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru.

Interestingly, IISc, which the QS World University Rankings has adjudged as the top research university globally, ahead of Harvard, Princeton University and MIT, was edged out to the second position in the ‘overall’ category for the fifth consecutive year. A closer look at the score breakdown shows IISc (with 83.09 marks) falls behind IIT-Madras (86.69 marks) on parameters such as student strength, online education, published and granted patents, and the number of economically and socially deprived students.

Further, this category is dominated by Institutes of National Importance set up by an Act of Parliament. Of the 100 institutions in the ‘overall’ category, 36 are INIs such as IITs and NITs, 26 are state universities, and seven are central universities.

Ranks third to tenth in the ‘overall’ category have been secured by IIT-Delhi, IIT-Bombay, IIT-Kanpur, All Indian Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi, IIT-Kharagpur, IIT-Roorkee, IIT-Guwahati and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). The top 10 institutions under this category are largely consistent with last year’s rankings, with only AIIMS gaining three positions and moving up from Rank 9 to Rank 6 this year.

The NIRF-2023 report also acknowledges the consistent rankings of top-performing higher education institutions over the years. “…the ranking of institutions has largely remained consistent, especially amongst 25 top-ranked institutions, over the years, although individual ranks might have changed by a few slots for some institutions due to performance variations across institutions on some of the parameters. This demonstrates that the set of parameters that are being used for ranking are compact, coherent and inter-dependent,” the report states.