Banaras Hindu University’s (BHU) Dental College showed up twice in the NIRF 2025 Dental College Rankings. It’s the first time something like this has happened. The error came because the same data was sent two times, once by the college's dean and once by the main university.
Professor Harakh Chand Baranwal, who is the dean of BHU’s Dental Sciences faculty, confirmed this. He said the mistake happened because the faculty sent the data, and then the university sent it again at the last minute. That’s why the college appeared twice. He added that only the NIRF body can decide if one of the entries will be removed, not the college or university.
An internal check has been started to see how two similar entries made it through NIRF’s data checking. These rankings, released by the Ministry of Education, are very important to students and colleges.
To add context, here are the top five dental colleges in NIRF 2025:
- AIIMS, Delhi
- Saveetha Institute, Chennai
- Maulana Azad Institute, Delhi
- Dr. D. Y. Patil Vidyapeeth, Pune
- Manipal College, Manipal
In other coverage, the duplicate entries listed BHU’s Faculty of Dental Sciences once at rank 15 and again at rank 18, each under slightly different names. Both entries had nearly the same data on student numbers and budgets. But they differed in placement and salary figures, leading to different NIRF scores.
One version had zero undergraduate placements in 2021–22; the other had 20. The median salary numbers also did not match. NIRF seems to have treated the two as separate entries, which raises questions about the reliability of the ranking process.
