The Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court (HC) issued an interim stay order on Thursday, preventing the Union Education Ministry and the National Board of Accreditation (NBA) from publishing the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) rank list for 2025.
A bench of Justices J Nisha Banu and S Srimathy issued the ruling in response to a public interest litigation (PIL) case submitted by Dindigul resident C Chellamuthu, who alleged malpractices and a lack of transparency in the calculation of rank list scores, The New Indian Express reports.
Chellamuthu said in his appeal that the NIRF ranking is based solely on data provided by institutions, with no verification or auditing. He claimed that many universities submit fraudulent data to raise their rankings to attract students and multinational corporations (MNCs).
To make his case, he compares data from the National Assessment and Accreditation Council's (NAAC) AQAR (Annual Quality Assurance Report) reports and the NIRF reports, which are available online at select universities.
He asserted that the NIRF reports include higher figures for the number of PhD students, faculties, R&D money, consultancy project monies received, and so on than the AQAR reports.
Because the AQAR documents are validated by NAAC's expert committees, the differences in NIRF data show that institutions falsified their submissions to achieve higher rankings, Chellamuthu alleged.
This, he claimed, allows colleges with weak academic quality and infrastructure to get high rankings while many well-known public universities are disqualified.
He warned that such manipulation could hurt the country's higher education.
The petitioner asked the court to order the Union Ministry and NBA to publish NIRF rankings, which evaluate educational institutions countrywide, only after extensive verification and complete disclosure of the scoring methodology.
After considering the data, the bench issued an interim ruling. The government counsel asked for time to prepare a counter-affidavit, and the matter was postponed until April 24.
