Are IIM Mumbai’s high rankings based on inflated numbers?

This year, the Indian Institute of Management Mumbai has been ranked sixth among management institutes in the country by the ministry of education under the National Institutional Ranking Framework, or NIRF. This is a remarkable rise from the 29th position it held in 2019.

The institute has publicised this as a testament to its “unwavering commitment to academic excellence, innovative research” and its efforts towards “nurturing the next generation of business leaders”.

But in a letter written in February to the IIM Mumbai’s board of governors, the education ministry and the comptroller and auditor general of India, an employee of the institute raised questions about how it had achieved its ranking. The employee alleged that under its current director, Manoj Tiwari, IIM Mumbai had falsified the data it submitted to the NIRF, inflating its income, expenditure, and faculty numbers.

Scroll cross-checked the staffer’s claims by sourcing the relevant original documents from the website of the institution and the National Institutional Ranking Framework. We found significant discrepancies between the declarations IIM Mumbai made in submissions to NIRF and in its annual reports. For instance, income declared under three categories in the NIRF documents amounted to around Rs 135 crore between 2019 and 2023. For the same period, the income declared in the financial statements of the annual reports under the head that corresponded to these categories amounted to just over Rs 10 crore.

Scroll emailed detailed queries about these findings to the institute’s director and its board of governors. We also emailed the ministry of education to ask if data that institutions submitted for assessment under the ranking framework was independently verified.

A representative for the NIRF who asked to remain anonymous told Scroll, “The ranking is based on the data which is reported by the institution. If somebody needs clarification regarding the data then we ask the institution to respond to it and then if need be, we edit the data.” This story will be updated if any other responses are received.

Meanwhile, IIM Mumbai employees who agreed to speak to Scroll on the condition of anonymity said the whistleblower who had flagged the discrepancies had been suspended. “The administration claimed that the employee had falsified these numbers,” one employee said. “If that was true, then they should have conducted a probe and proved them wrong. Instead, they suspended them.”

A steady rise in rankings

The education ministry has been ranking institutions and universities across the country under the National Institutional Ranking Framework since 2015. The framework evaluates parameters such as “teaching, learning and resources, research and professional practices and graduation outcomes”.

Until 2023, IIM Mumbai was known as the National Institute of Industrial Engineering, though it also offered management programmes. In July 2023, after both houses of the Parliament passed the IIM (Amendment) Bill 2023, the institute became the country’s twenty-first Indian Institute of Management.

In 2019, it was ranked 29th in the list of the best management institutes in the country. In 2020 and 2021, it was ranked 12th and in 2022 it rose to ninth rank. Then, in 2023, the year its name was changed to Indian Institute of Management Mumbai, it climbed to the seventh position, and in the latest ranking, for 2024, it was placed in the sixth position.

This period overlaps with the directorship of Manoj Tiwari, who has previously been a professor and member of the governing board of the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, and currently also holds the additional charge of vice chancellor of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai.

According to the employee who wrote the letter to the board of governors, Tiwari, “in a desperate bid to inflate his perceived managerial prowess, resorted to falsifying data submitted to NIRF”. The employee wrote, “Initially incredulous, I felt compelled to conduct thorough verification. The evidence I uncovered through meticulous investigation is nothing short of appalling.”

The employee alleged that there were discrepancies in the data that the institute presented in its annual reports, and the data it submitted to the education ministry for assessment under NIRF.

Income and expenditure

According to the institute’s annual reports, its sources of income include fees, grants and income from investments, as well as a category titled “Other income”. Its submissions to NIRF, meanwhile, cite three sources of income: consultancy projects, sponsored research, and executive and management development programmes.

A faculty member, who spoke to Scroll on condition of anonymity, said income from these three categories corresponds to “Other income” in the institute’s annual reports. The NIRF representative explained that only these categories are considered in the rankings because there would be wide disparities between government and private universities when it came to income earned from sources such as government grants and fees.

In their letter, the employee compared income declared over the years as “Other income” in the annual reports with the income declared as earned from executive and management development programmes in the NIRF documents, noting that there was a divergence between the two of more than Rs 62 crore.

Scroll included incomes from all three categories mentioned in the NIRF documents, and compared it with the “Other income” figures declared in the annual reports. We found this increased the gap to more than Rs 120 crore.

Specifically, we found that, according to documents submitted for assessment under NIRF, the institute claimed to have earned around Rs 135 crore between 2019 and 2023 from consultancy projects, sponsored research and executive and management development programmes.

However, in its annual reports, the total income declared under “other income” for this period was only around Rs 10 crore.

Similarly, according to the NIRF documents, the institute’s total expenditure between 2019 and 2023 was approximately Rs 478 crore. According to its financial statements, however, it spent only around Rs 380 crore in this period.

In its NIRF documents, the institute listed its expenditures for each year under “utilised amount for capital expenditure” and “utilised amount for operational expenditure”. In its financial statements, it declared a total expenditure amount for each year, under several heads including “academic expenses” and “administrative and general expenses”.

Scroll’s analysis found that for three of the four years between 2019 and 2023, the figures for expenditure in the NIRF documents was higher than those declared in the annual report. The total figure for expenditure across all these years was almost Rs 100 crore higher according to the NIRF documents, compared to the annual reports.

Faculty numbers

With regard to the institute’s claims about faculty numbers, the employee’s letter noted, “there exists a significant inflation of data aimed at bolstering the institute’s ranking. According to the NIRF framework, only full-time regular appointments qualify as regular faculty within this category. However, in an attempt to inflate their standing, numerous faculty members who have either never actively contributed to the institute’s teaching efforts or have only delivered occasional guest lectures are erroneously listed as Regular Faculty.”

Scroll’s analysis revealed that there were indeed some discrepancies in the two sets of data when it came to faculty numbers.

For the year 2021, the NIRF documents stated “Number of faculty members entered: 100”. In the annual report for the year 2020-’21, however, including the director, only a total of 60 individuals were listed as faculty members, under the categories of professor, associate professor, assistant professor and adjunct faculty.

In 2022, the NIRF documents stated, “Number of faculty members entered: 72”. The annual report for 2021-’22, however, listed only 51 faculty members, including the director, under the categories of professor, associate professor, assistant professor and adjunct faculty.

While for these years, the institute’s NIRF documents only mention the number of faculty, for the year 2023, the institute also listed the names of 75 faculty members, including the director and two ad-hoc faculty. The annual report for 2022-’23, however, listed only 58 faculty members, including the director and one distinguished professor, and others under the categories of professor, associate professor, assistant professor and adjunct professor. For this year, Scroll’s analysis revealed that 32 names listed in the NIRF document were not listed in the annual report, while 15 names listed in the annual report were not listed in the NIRF document.

The NIRF representative told Scroll that in counting faculty, those hired on a “contract basis” are also considered. However, as Scroll found, this would not explain any discrepancy in numbers, since the annual reports included numbers of “adjunct faculty”, which refers to those hired on contract – that is, these faculty members were taken into account while calculating the discrepancy.

Fear of retribution

Employees of IIM Mumbai who agreed to speak to Scroll on the condition of anonymity said that they were keen for these discrepancies to be made public. But they added that they were wary of speaking up because the employee who wrote the letter is currently on the fifth month of a six-month suspension.

One employee said that faculty and staff at IIM Mumbai feared the administration. “Since it is a government institution nobody dares to speak up because they maybe penalised for it,” they said. “The administration holds a lot of power.”

The employee rued the fact that the rankings were allegedly being manipulated. “This is a government ranking, there should be some amount of sanctity,” they said. “I wonder why even after so much has happened, the ministry is continuing to be lenient to the director.”

Employees also said they were eager to bring the institution’s problems to light at this point because the director is up for a second term. “If he comes back, I can no longer remain an employee here,” another employee said.

“The due process of selecting a director has not been completed yet but an announcement was made at an event about how he will be coming back as a director,” a third employee said. “How is this right?”

The first employee said that when allegations about data being manipulated began to circulate, “I decided to verify the data and it was eye-opening for me. I realised that what was mentioned in the letter was in fact true.”

They added, “The biggest problem, however, is that the NIRF doesn’t have its own mechanism to verify the data that institutions are sending to it.”