The NIRF Rankings: Hope and hegemony in Indian higher education

Concluding thoughts from a student fellowship project

This past year, I’ve been looking into the legal profession landscape in India. I join good company: for decades, scholars, lawyers, and the Indian government itself have repeatedly debated ways to reform and improve India’s legal profession, which since independence in 1947 has faltered from low prestige and a multitude of problems. One area of particular focus has been the country’s legal education system, which has faced radical transformation over the decades. In the 1980s, for example, many schools started to adopt a new five-year B.A., LL.B. program, and in the last few years, more schools began to focus on clinical education. Reform continues.

A much more recent innovation has piqued my interest, however. In 2018, the legal education system saw the introduction of government-run rankings for higher education institutions (“HEIs”) in the form of the National Institutional Ranking Framework (“NIRF”). To be sure, in some ways, the NIRF rankings for law schools were neither novel nor innovative. For one, the NIRF had already been in existence since 2016, expanding to law and a few other disciplines two years later. Second, private organizations had been ranking law schools in the country for years. Rankings, after all, are far from new.

Yet, in search of the classically proclaimed benefits of rankings, the Indian government put its HEI rankings in a uniquely center-stage position. These government-run rankings potentially carry with them an enormous amount of influence and, within the context of the law, add yet another dimension in the interplay between the government and the legal profession. Despite this potential import, I was surprised to see a relative lack of focus thus far on how the NIRF was impacting legal education in India. 

Digging into the research myself, I came across a few findings. First, the NIRF has placed itself in some ways in a conflicted position by setting out to accomplish multiple goals. Of course, on the one hand, it seeks to help students make better informed decisions. But on the other hand, it aims to both create a ranking system fit for India’s context and improve Indian HEIs so that they may better compete on the international stage. The NIRF, launched as a direct counterweight to Western-dominated international rankings, thus attempts to concurrently excel in and rebuff the global system of rankings. 

My second finding is a more preliminary one, subject to change. Looking to the actual impact the NIRF rankings are having, it has been clear that they face increasing levels of buy-in from HEIs in general, including law schools. Much of this success can be attributed to the fact that the NIRF fundamentally provides legitimacy to the obscure world of rankings which had formerly been dominated by private organizations in India. This success and buy-in have ramifications. Analyzing the law school ranking data from the last seven years, the rankings seem to be influencing institutional behavior, evidenced by the rise in average scores within the NIRF methodology, both across the board and when measuring consistently ranked schools over the years. Law schools seem to be responding to the incentives of the NIRF system and are working to improve their metrics. Whether these improvements reflect genuine improvements in the educational experience or better data collection methods is still unclear. Additionally, peer reception appears to play a disproportionate role in the rankings, favoring public law schools, yet this subjective consideration remains subject to variability. Like with any ranking system, these patterns have faced a variety of criticisms. 

Lastly, my conclusion builds off these findings: that the NIRF is in a conflicted position and that it is having a measurable impact on the legal education landscape. In particular, it seems to me that rather than counter the global ranking system and the hierarchies it perpetuates, the NIRF more fundamentally acts to supplement it, reinforcing the market ideology of education it promotes and further legitimizing the practice of rankings as a whole. While the NIRF has been effective in generating some concrete benefits, including transparency and a renewed focus on reform, it has—within its first decade of existence—exacerbated existing fault lines within the country in its quest to counter the hegemonic influence of international rankings. This is evidenced by the regional, state-level critiques that have been leveled against the NIRF and even the creation of an individual Kerala state ranking system that attempts to both rebuff and excel in the NIRF system (sound familiar?). Ultimately, the NIRF experiment highlights the self-perpetuating grip of rankings, which once established, often appears to its dissenters as indispensable despite its faults. The fact that the NIRF is government-run and already influencing the legal profession only raises the stakes further, deserving further attention.

Shiv Pandya is a third year law student and student fellow with the Center on the Legal Profession. He completed his B.A. in Economics, magna cum laude, from Pomona College in 2020, and worked for two years as a supply chain consultant prior to law school.

At Harvard Law School, Shiv is the Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Human Rights Journal and has been involved in Lambda, SALSA, and the Crimmigration Clinic. With this fellowship, he plans to conduct an analysis into the role of government in legal education in India, specifically by analyzing the impact of rankings on institutional behavior.