Ctrl+Alt+Deceive: AMU Fudged its Law Placement Data For Years; NIRF Looked the Other Way
Every year, NIRF, India's premier university ranking system under the Education Ministry, publishes a list that students trust and institutions build their reputations around. An RTI based investigation by The Leaflet on India’s largest minority varsity now shows that it misrepresented data and NIRF simply accepted it on face value.
Published on: 19 August 2026, 08:46 am
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: A Case Study
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.
