Indian Institute of Science tops NIRF 2018 rankings

The Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, has topped the list among Indian institutes in the National Institution Ranking Framework (NIRF) 2018 rankings released on Tuesday. IIT-Madras topped the list among engineering schools while Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad topped the management school list.

Miranda House, Delhi, topped the colleges list followed by St.Stephen's Delhi and Bishop Heber College, Trichy in the NIRF Rankings 2018.

Similar to other rankings by private firms, IIM-Ahmedabad was followed by Bangalore and Calcutta in the management school category.

Unlike the previous years, this edition of the rankings saw a healthy response from a cross-section of institutes in the country. Almost 750 institutes that did not participate last year did so this year.

In the overall rankings, IISc followed by IIT-Madras and IIT-Bombay were the top three institutes in the country. Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University also made it to the top ten list bagging the sixth position, just behind IIT- Delhi and Kharagpur.

NIRF was approved by the MInistry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) and launched in September 29, 2015. The idea was to have a ranking framework for Indian educational institutions since the MHRD was of the view that global rankings often don't paint the right picture.

This is the third year of the ranking. In 2017, general degree colleges were also been made part of the ranking.

Apart from the overall ranks, categories like pharmacy, medicine, law and architecture were segmented in the listing of the top institutions. In the law category, National Law School of India University of Bangalore stood on the top of the list while National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research Mohali took the first rank in the pharmacy category. All India Institute of Medical Sciences New Delhi bagged the first position in the medicine category while IIT Kharagpur stood first in the architecture field.

Last year, Prakash Javadekar, Minister of Human Resource Development, had said that in the near future, the grants/funds given to institutes will be linked to their ranking in the NIRF. This had led to more number of institutes participating in the rankings this year.