THE NATIONAL INSTITUTIONAL RANKING FRAMEWORK (‘NIRF’), is the Ministry of Education's flagship annual ranking of over 1,300 colleges and universities across India. It ranks institutions on five broad parameters: teaching resources, research, graduate outcomes, inclusivity, and perception. The scores are published with apparent precision and methodology, donning a rigorous look.
Participating universities submit data to the NIRF Data Capturing System, and publish those figures on their websites before ranks are released. The official methodology vaguely empowers the ranking authority to conduct ‘random checks’ on a sample basis. In reality, the process requires no systematic scrutiny or proof to establish the veracity of the complete stated figures.
Within this system, placement figures and the median salary of placed graduates matter significantly in the NIRF Rankings for professional-degree categories (Law, Medicine, Engineering, Management, Pharmacy, and Architecture). Together it accounts for almost 14-16 percent of a university's total NIRF score. Inflate those numbers convincingly, a university can leapfrog other universities with far superior faculty, infrastructure, and research output.
Aligarh Muslim University runs a five-year B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) programme across three campuses: the main Faculty of Law at Aligarh with 120 seats, and two off-campus centres in Malappuram, Kerala, and Murshidabad, West Bengal, with sixty seats each. That is 240 students per year, spread across three states.
In NIRF 2025, AMU's law programme ranked 9th in the country, up from 12th the previous year. But the score breakdown tells a different story. In teaching resources, research, and perception (the parameters that reflect actual institutional quality), AMU scores well below the top four law schools: NLSIU Bangalore, NLU Delhi, NALSAR Hyderabad, and NUJS Kolkata.
Graduation Outcomes (‘GO’) is the NIRF parameter that measures how many graduates got placed in jobs and what salary they were paid. Placement count and median salary together account for 16 percent of a university's final ranking score. In this parameter, AMU scores 93.26 out of 100, while NLSIU, NALSAR, and NLU Delhi score between 84 and 87 on the same measure. Among the top forty NIRF-ranked law schools in the country, only Symbiosis Law School Pune scores higher than AMU.
On teaching quality, research output, and faculty resources, AMU trails in each of them significantly. But on that one parameter whose data comes from what the university itself reports, AMU somehow leaves them all behind.
In NIRF 2025, AMU's law programme ranked 9th in the country, up from 12th the previous year. But the score breakdown tells a different story.
For the 2023-24 graduating batch, AMU declared to NIRF that 182 of its 218 law graduates were placed at a median annual salary of Rs 12,50,000. The year before it was 184 placed out of 217 with the same median salary. The year after it was 185 placed out of 219, with the same median salary to the rupee across three consecutive cycles. In all three years, when placed students are added to the number of students who proceeded to higher studies, the total accounts for every graduate studying 5-year law from AMU. That kind of perfection is, to put it gently, unusual.
In 2025, Right to Information (‘RTI’) applications were filed at AMU's Malappuram and Murshidabad centres. Murshidabad graduated 44 students from the 5-year law programme in 2023-24. On placements arranged by the Department of Law: it showed ‘Nil’. No placement drives or salary data was recorded. Malappuram graduated 51 students that year. The Centre's reply recorded one confirmed placement, and nine students whose names had been forwarded to another firm, with final outcomes awaited.
The two off-campus Centres together produced 95 graduates and one confirmed placement. Subtracting those 95 from AMU's total graduating batch of 218 and the Aligarh main campus is left with 123 graduates of its own. AMU's declared total of 182 placements, minus the most generous reading of the off-campus contribution (10, if all nine forwarded names are counted as placed), leaves 172 placements that Aligarh would need to account for from a batch of 123 graduates.
AMU's Annual Report for 2022-23 names only ten placements while another document providing a complete list of all the placed students of AMU lists eleven placements, against the 184 AMU (Mallapuram and Murshidabad centres included) declared to NIRF for that same batch. AMU uploads placement registers to its website as supporting evidence for its NIRF submission. A scrutiny of those registers raises more questions than they answer. And, between 2022 and 2025, inflated NIRF placement claims, missing salaries, and jumbled student data continue to contradict AMU's official reports.
Some student names appear more than once; in one document tagged to the law programme and in another tagged to engineering or postgraduate courses at the same employer, for the same salary. Other entries carry programme labels so mixed up that it is impossible to identify which department or batch the student actually belongs to. Within the same records there are advocates listed as working in private practice, with salary marked as "not provided." What is harder to understand is how a median of Rs 12,50,000 holds up when a significant portion of the "placed" cohort has no salary on record at all.
For the median salary figure, a declared median of Rs 12,50,000 across 184 placed students requires at least 92 of those students to have earned that figure or above. No register or combination of registers show numbers anywhere near that count.
The first RTI application on this matter was filed in August 2024. AMU's Faculty of Law replied eleven months later on the eve of a hearing before the Central Information Commission (‘CIC’) as AMU had not provided any information sought. The Commission in Order No. CIC/ALMUV/A/2024/650885 noted considerable delay, but did not direct disclosure of the records, and did not impose a penalty.
AMU's only substantive reply said that placement data is collated from multiple internal units; the Training and Placement Office, the Internal Quality Assurance Cell (‘IQAC’), and the NIRF Coordinator — and that the process is dynamic and continuous. On how the median salary of Rs 12,50,000 was computed when two of the three campuses have no salary records at all, the reply said nothing. And no reply on how 182 placements could emerge from a campus of 123 graduates.
A second round of RTIs were filed in 2025. It was routed through the Nodal Office for AMU Centres and addressed to the Central Public Information Officers (CPIO) at all three locations. The Malappuram Centre replied within the statutory time of thirty days of filing the application, while the Murshidabad Centre replied in the second appeal; of whose figures have led to the unusual math. Aligarh’s CPIO, however, has not issued any reply as was the case in the first round.
Detailed questions were emailed by the reporter to AMU's Registrar, Dean of Law, IQAC Coordinator, Placement Office, and Public Relations Office in May 2026, and subsequently followed up on behalf of The Leaflet in August 2026, regarding the findings in this piece. No reply had been received. The report will be updated following any response.
AMU may be the subject of this piece, but it is certainly not alone in gaming a system that makes gaming easy. When 16 percent of a ranking score depends on placement numbers that no external body verifies, the incentive is universal. The question isn't why an institution would overstate its figures — the question is why more wouldn't.
In March 2025, in C. Chellamuthu v. Union of India (W.P (MD) No. 6086 of 2025), a petitioner approached the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court alleging that there was no transparency or accountability regarding the data submitted to NIRF by participating institutions and there was discrepancy on the exact method scores were gathered and calculated by NIRF. The High Court initially granted an interim stay on the publication of NIRF 2025 rankings on the ground that submissions were not independently verified. The stay was later vacated as the petitioner did not approach the High Court with sufficient evidence; the rankings were published in September 2025, and the framework continued without change. The Ministry of Education, which operates NIRF, has never demonstrated any supervisory authority over the accuracy of the data it relies on. The Online Feedback System — through which third parties can flag problems is merely a comment inbox. It has not been shown to function as an enforcement tool against any institution.
The Ministry of Education and NIRF built a system that ranks institutions of national importance on data those institutions produce themselves. The inevitable result of that design is a situation where a publicly funded University sits at 9th in India in law on figures its own paperwork cannot support.
The Solution
The solution to the issue is not extraordinary. The Ministry of Education can require universities to submit enrolment-numbered placement and salary records before a ranking is published. NIRF must institute a sanctions regime of consequences. Public correction of the record at minimum should and disqualification from a ranking cycle for institutions whose submissions cannot be reconciled with primary evidence are other solutions. AMU in the interim should release the underlying records in anonymised form, publicly, under Section 4 of the Right to Information Act 2005.
Until any of that happens, the ranking will stand, the number will be cited, and the institution will benefit, even as innocent students would fall victim. The burden of showing that the declared figures are accurate belongs to the institution that declared them. That burden has not been discharged. And the system that should require it to be discharged has, so far, shown no interest in asking.
Links to Supporting Documents:
AMU Annual Report 2023-24 https://api.amu.ac.in/storage/file/annual-report/1737030979.pdf
AMU Annual Report 2024-25 https://api.amu.ac.in/storage/file/annual-report/1763477031.pdf
NIRF Institute data submitted by AMU Law 2026 https://api.amu.ac.in/storage/file/10182/file_management/1775127580.pdf
NIRF Law Ranking 2024 https://www.nirfindia.org/Rankings/2024/LawRanking.html
NIRF Law Ranking 2023 https://www.nirfindia.org/Rankings/2023/LawRanking.html
Latest NIRF Ranking Metrics for Law https://www.nirfindia.org/nirfpdfcdn/2025/framework/Law.pdf
Annual Quality Assurance Report (AQAR) 2023-24. Contains links to placement and higher studies .pdf and .xlsx files of all AMU Departments. https://api.amu.ac.in/storage/file/10182/file_management/1745989101.pdf
Annual Quality Assurance Report (AQAR) 2022-23. Contains links to placement and higher studies .pdf and .xlsx files of all AMU Departments. https://api.amu.ac.in/storage//file/10182/file_management/1724832903.pdf