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...

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