While the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) dominated the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) 2023, with IIT Madras at the top in the overall ranking, only 44.51% Engineering faculty in the participating institutes have doctoral qualifications and 55.49% hold Master’s degree, data released by the Ministry of Education (MoE) showed. IIT Madras retained first position in the NIRF Rankings 2023 with a 100/100 score in perception amongst peers. However, of the 1,61,195 teaching staff, just 71,745 faculty in Engineering colleges in India hold a PhD degree.

What’s more alarming is that faculty with doctoral qualification is concentrated in the top 100 institutions who participated in this ranking, while remaining institutions have even fewer faculty with doctoral degrees, the assessment of the ranking system revealed. The 16-member NIRF assessment committee has called this “a serious handicap” stating that doctoral training is essential for preparing teachers to teach at the higher education level.

Nevertheless, at least 33.21% teaching faculty in the eligible institutions in Engineering discipline have eight to 15 years of experience while 34.65% teachers hold more than 15 years of experience, the assessment showed.  

Among the top 10 institutes in India as per the NIRF Rankings are IIT Madras, IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Roorkee, and IIT Guwahati.

Despite scoring the highest in popularity, IITs could achieve only 50 to 60% marks out of 100 in Outreach and Inclusivity parameter which looks at the gender and regional diversity in the institute. As per the analysis of the committee, of 28,18,302 total students enrolled in different Engineering programmes, just 8,82,420 (31.31%) were females while 19,35,882 (68.69%) were male. In terms of regional diversity, the data showed that 76.74% of students in the assessed Engineering institutes came from within the state, 22.51% of students came from other states and less than 1% of the students were from outside the country.

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Furthermore, there has been a downward trend in the Faculty Student Ratio in IITs since 2020. The overall Faculty Student Ratio in the Engineering discipline has dropped by 1.42% in 2022. “Presumably, decrease in FRU from 2021 could possibly be because of the corona pandemic when classes were being held virtually and institutes might have saved on infrastructure and its maintenance, among other factors,” the NIRF report said. 

A total of 8,686 Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) participated in the ranking exercise. Participant institutes were ranked based on five broad generic groups of parameters which included Teaching, Learning and Resources (TLR), Research and Professional Practice (RP), Graduation Outcome (GO), Outreach and Inclusivity(OI) and Perception (PR).

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