The National Institutional Ranking Framework, or NIRF, recently released its rankings for institutions across all streams of education. Within this framework, BITS Pilani (the university, collectively) was ranked 26th overall. This was a drop by five places when compared to last year, when the Institute secured a rank of 21. In the engineering stream, the Institute was ranked 17th – a three rank drop from last year’s 14th.

NIRF was formed in 2016 as part of an initiative by the Ministry of Human Resource Development to compare the progress of individual institutes across streams. The ranking criteria employed by the organization is determined by a core committee which consists of sixteen members. These members are eminent people who work in the education stream – a list that includes the directors of the top five IITs and the Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University. Each criterion on the list is measured quantitatively; the NIRF allots marks to different parameters under five core attributes. These core attributes are the following – teaching, research, graduation outcomes, inclusivity, and public perception. Every year, ranked institutes are asked to submit statistical proof of their performance in each parameter. The numbers are then used to calculate the overall score for institutes, on the basis of which they are then ranked. The weights given to each parameter while calculating the overall score hasn’t been disclosed by the NIRF.

The Breakdown

Parameters	Teaching, Learning & Resources	Research and Professional Practice	Graduation Outcomes	Outreach & Inclusivity	Perception	Overall
Rank (2018)	95	28	64	65	15	26
Rank (2017)	61	29	40	272	8	21

Teaching, learning, and resources

BITS Pilani’s annual expenditure for the academic year of 2016-2017 was Rs. 396 crores. In comparison, the amount for IIT Madras through the same academic year totaled Rs. 697 crores. In addition, BITS Pilani also has a very small faculty-student ratio, with the total number of teaching faculty with a PhD (for all three BITS campuses combined) being the same as those at individual IITs.

Another reason for the poor rank is the lack of Executive Development Programs at the Institute. These are optional programs that train students pursuing a technical stream in basic management skills. Currently, BITS does not have these programs while most other technical institutions ranked ahead run at least one.

Research and professional practice

One of the big reasons for the drop in BITS’s rank can be attributed to a mild stagnancy in the number of research citations that the campus sees. While most other institutes that surpass BITS have seen a near doubling of their academic performance statistics between 2017 and 2018, BITS has only seen marginal improvement. For example, the number of research citations the college faculty receive from the top 25% of highly cited papers according to the scientific journal Web of Science—a parameter the NIRF judges institutes on—only went up from 304 citations to 575. On the other hand, IIT Bombay in 2017 saw a jump from 1091 to 1932.

Graduation outcomes

While the median salary for BITS is higher than that of both IIT Kharagpur, Madras, and Roorkee, the number of PhD students graduating from the college is relatively lower in comparison. Additionally, a similar trend can be observed in the number of students admitted to a top university. All of this leads to a much lowered score across these parameters.

Outreach and inclusivity

While BITS has a healthy gender ratio—when compared to other top engineering institutes— there is a no reservation for scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, or other backward classes. While the rankings have seen a significant improvement, the overall rank in this category still remains rather poor.

Perception

Aside from this, public perception is also a major contributor to the rank drop. In this parameter, the NIRF scores institutes based on people’s responses to online advertisements. For this category BITS Pilani is scored 35.32, with IISc and IIT Madras being scored 82.16 and 81.39, respectively. Anna University scored 62.82 in this category.

Pharmacy

Across the Pharmacy stream, BITS is ranked 5th in the country – an increase from the 6th position it secured last year. This is attributed to a strong increase across virtually all parameters in the Pharmacy department, specifically in the teaching area.