Madras HC issues interim stay on NIRF 2025 rankings release over data manipulation allegations

In a recent order, the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court, on March 20, issued an interim stay, preventing the National Board of Accreditation (NBA) and the Union Education Ministry from releasing the 2025 National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) ranking list.

The order came in response to a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by C Chellamuthu of Dindigul, Tamil Nadu, who alleged that the score-calculation process for the rank list was unclear and involved malpractices.

A bench of Justices J Nisha Banu and S Srimathy delivered the judgment.

In his appeal, Chellamuthu claimed that the NIRF rankings are determined solely based on the information submitted by institutions, without any auditing or verification.

According to him, many schools submit fictitious data to boost their rankings and attract students and multinational corporations.

He provided comparative data between the NIRF reports, available online by certain universities, and the AQAR (Annual Quality Assurance Report) reports from the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC).

He argued that the NIRF reports contain more data than the AQAR reports in areas such as the number of PhD students, faculty, R&D funds, and consulting project funds.

Chellamuthu contended that the discrepancies in the NIRF data suggest that institutions may have falsified their submissions to achieve higher rankings, given that AQAR reports are validated by NAAC’s expert committees.

He claimed that many reputable state universities are excluded while institutions with subpar academic infrastructure and quality manage to secure top rankings.

He warned that such manipulation could harm the country's higher education system.

The petitioner urged the court to direct the Union Ministry and NBA to release the NIRF rankings only after the complete disclosure of the scoring system and thorough verification.

The bench issued an interim order after reviewing the submitted data. The hearing was adjourned until April 24 after the government counsel requested more time to submit a counter-affidavit.