Madras High Court Stops NIRF 2025 Publication: Inside Story of India’s ₹500 Crore Education Ranking Fraud No One Wants to Talk About
- Dr. Deepessh Divaakaran
- Mar 22
- 7 min read
The Madras High Court’s interim stay on the 2025 NIRF rankings is a seismic moment in India’s academic landscape.
But this is not just about a court order—it’s about a rigged system, manipulated data, and a silent industry thriving under the garb of education reform.
Here's the story of how rankings became a business, consultants became puppet masters, and institutions lost their soul.
Contents in this Article
Madras High Court Stops NIRF 2025 Publication: A Map Drawn in Disguise
What if the roadmap to your future was forged?
What if the compass guiding millions of students was calibrated by deceit?
On March 21, 2025, the Madras High Court issued an interim order restraining the Union Education Ministry from releasing the NIRF 2025 rankings.
Link to the News: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/madras-hc-restrains-centre-from-publishing-2025-nirf-ranking/articleshow/119322246.cms
For many of us in this field, it felt less like news—and more like a long-overdue reckoning.
For years, we’ve known the truth. We just waited for someone in power to say it out loud.
A House of Cards Built on Spreadsheets
The Public Interest Litigation (PIL) that triggered this order alleged what insiders already whispered: Institutions have been fudging critical metrics—faculty count, research funding, PhD numbers, placement stats—all to climb the NIRF ladder.
Unlike NAAC, which has Data Verification and Validation team (DVV) and sends committees for document verification (Again another Topic as this is also Forged in Many Institutes), NIRF operates on trust.
Institutions upload their data.
No audit.
No validation.
No consequences—until now.
This system, designed with noble intent, has mutated into a mechanism that rewards manipulation over merit.
I have written in Details about the Flaws in NIRF Ranking, you can read the Article here: https://www.deepeshdivakaran.com/post/exposing-the-flaws-why-nirf-rankings-are-misleading-students-and-urgently-need-a-revamp
The Exposé: A ₹400–500 Crore Black Market in Broad Daylight
Let’s pull the curtain back.
Over 10,000+ institutions participated in NIRF 2024.Consultants typically charge between ₹3–5 lakhs annually for “ranking improvement services.”
Do the math, and you’re looking at a ₹400–500 crore industry operating in the shadows.
But what are these consultants really doing?
Behind the Curtain: How the Game Is Played
Let’s walk through a common script.
University A wants a better rank.
Consultant X enters the picture with a confident grin and a Google Sheet.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll handle everything.”
What he really means is this:
Show guest lecturers as permanent faculty.
Split the same research funding across multiple departments.
Inflate PhD enrolment figures.
Fabricate placement packages with no audit trail.
And just in case you think this is exaggerated—let me recreate a classic WhatsApp exchange that typically happens in the End of December of every year which is the panic weeks, just before NIRF data submission:
📱 [WhatsApp Chat – December, 11:34 PM]
🎓 University Coordinator: Sir, our patent count is too low. That X University has 120.
🧑💼 Consultant: How many do you have now?
🎓 University Coordinator: We have 80 only.
🧑💼 Consultant: Then make it 100. We’ll balance it with your higher publication count. 100 is enough.
🎓 University Coordinator: But sir… we don’t have the data.
🧑💼 Consultant: That’s okay 😎. If NIRF checks—which they don’t—we’ll buy some patents. I’ll arrange it.
🎓 University Coordinator: Wow! Great! You are genius! 😍
🧑💼 Consultant: Thank you 😊. This will easily place you above X University. 🏆
(Disclaimer: I’m just recreating. Any resemblance to actual persons, institutions, or WhatsApp groups is purely your imagination—driven by sarcasm. 🫢)
That’s the level of normalcy we’ve reached.
Where data doesn’t represent reality, it represents ambition—manufactured, packaged, and uploaded.
And NIRF accepts it. No cross-verification. No audit.
Just numbers fed into a black box.
And from that, national rankings are born.
When Rank Has Nothing to Do with Integrity
Let’s take a real example.
IIM Rohtak was ranked 12th in India by NIRF in 2024.
On paper—an elite institution.
In practice—a case study in everything that’s broken.
Here’s what happened:
2018: FIR filed against the Director under sexual harassment charges by a former assistant professor.
2018–2022: The Ministry repeatedly asked for his basic eligibility documents—a bachelor's degree certificate. He never submitted it.
2022: Despite all this, he was reappointed for another 5-year term.
2023–2024: An audit flagged ₹3.2 crore disbursed as variable pay—allegedly financial misappropriation.
March 2025: The Ministry finally ordered the Board of Governors to suspend or place him on leave.
And yet... NIRF ranked IIM Rohtak 12th. Not 120th. 12th.
Let that sink in.
Because if this doesn’t shatter the illusion of credibility, I don’t know what will.
How does an institution with such serious administrative, ethical, and financial red flags earn a top rank?
Simple: because the ranking system doesn’t rank integrity. It only ranks Excel sheets.
The Mirage of Perception: Where Transparency Disappears
Of all the parameters in NIRF, the most mystifying is the Perception Score.
Every year, institutions wait with bated breath—
Not for research impact, or graduate outcomes,
But for a number that seems to come from some cosmic lottery system.
There is no published formula.
No detailed breakdown.
No clarity on who voted, how many voted, or what the criteria even were.
And yet, these scores swing rankings up or down drastically.
Take two institutions:
One with ground-breaking research, international patents, and world-class faculty.
Another with glossy brochures, social media hype, and strategic “networking.”
Guess who often gets a better perception score?
Because in this category—perception is power.
And power, in opaque systems, flows to the loudest—not the worthiest.
It’s no longer a metric.
It’s a mirage.
Designed to reward prestige theatre, not academic truth.
And in a country where perception already trumps substance in so many spheres—
Do we really want to embed that flaw into our national ranking system?
Until perception is made transparent, traceable, and accountable,
It will continue to erode the credibility of NIRF from the inside out.
The Tech Mirage: AI as a Smokescreen
Now comes the part that infuriates me the most—as a tech founder and someone who’s built systems for universities.
Many consultants are now selling “AI-powered NIRF prediction tools.”
Let’s be clear: there is no real use of AI or ML in predicting NIRF ranks.
Why?
The data is self-declared, not public or standardized.
The ranking formula isn’t transparent, and changes without notice.
There is no large dataset to train reliable AI models.
What you’re actually getting?
Rebranded Excel sheets dressed up with dashboards.
And this gets sold to unsuspecting institutions as “cutting-edge technology.”
This is not innovation.
This is intellectual fraud.
What Happens When Ranks Lie?
When you reward numbers over truth, systems rot from the inside.
We are a country where lakhs of students choose institutions based on ranks.
Parents mortgage futures. Students move cities.
Dreams are built on those lists.
And if those rankings are based on lies, we’re not just misguiding them—we're betraying them.
It’s a slow erosion of values.
A moral hollowing of the very institutions meant to elevate us.
The Moral Crossroads: Time to Choose
The Madras High Court has done its part.
Now it’s our turn.
Here’s what must happen next:
NIRF must be brought under a Parliamentary Act.
CAG-audited data should be made mandatory.
Public access to score calculation and ranking methodology.
Strict penalties for any institution caught manipulating data.
End the grey market of consultancy-based manipulation.
We don’t need a better secret algorithm. We need better honesty.
The Collateral Damage: Students Pay the Price for Rank Fraud
While administrators climb ranks and consultants cash cheques, let’s talk about who really suffers.
The student.
The 17-year-old who picks a college based on a glowing NIRF rank—only to find no real faculty, fake MoUs, outdated labs, and broken promises.
The first-generation learner who takes a ₹20-lakh education loan—trusting that “Rank 12” means guaranteed placement and career clarity.
The parent who believes in the “Indian Ivy League” dream—because a government-backed rank surely must mean quality.
What happens when they discover the truth?
Burnout.
Depression.
Dropouts.
Wasted years and crushing debt.
All because someone, somewhere, changed “80” to “100” in a spreadsheet.
Let’s stop pretending this is an administrative issue.
It’s not.
It’s a crime of consequence—committed in silence, and paid for in lives.
When ranks lie, dreams die.
Closing Reflection: Integrity Must Be Non-Negotiable
Institutions aren’t just being manipulated by the ranking system.
They’re also being misled by those promising shortcuts.
This isn’t a glitch in the system.
This is the system.
And if we don’t fix it now, we’ll be left with universities full of rank—but empty of value.
If truth must be ranked, let it be ranked above everything else.
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