To help the students and guardians in decision making to make a comparative study of the existing institutions about their quality, Govt. of India has initiated a process of ranking the institutions. The institutions include universities, arts colleges, science colleges or discipline like medical, engineering, management etc. The rankings are relative and conducted every year. National Institute of Ranking Framework (www.nirfindia.org) or NIRF in short has been designed in such a way that it will consider every aspects of an institution. In NIRF, though the numbers of participating institution are not yet 100%, gradually it is expected that every institution of the country will participate in this initiatives. In this article, an attempt has been made to brief about the ranking framework for the academic institutions. To rank the institution, a set of metrics have been developed based on some parameters, the parameters are broadly classified into five different heads. There will be two types of ranking- i) overall ranking and ii) discipline specific ranking. Overall ranking will be given if the student intake is not less than 1000. Institution with single main discipline like engineering, arts, pharmacy etc. and students’ intake less than 1000 will be considered for discipline specific ranking. The Open Universities and affiliating university (only if they don’t have teaching and research campus on their own) will not be normally considered for ranking. The ranking will be considered only if the institution has graduated at least three batches and the duration for UG is minimum three years and PG is minimum two years. There are seven disciplines considered for ranking as on today, they are engineering, management, pharmacy, college, architecture, law and medical. The parameters considered for rankings are- a) Teaching, Learning & Resources b) Research and Professional Practice c) Graduation Outcomes d) Outreach and Inclusivity e) Perception.  The weightage for these parameters varies from discipline to discipline and overall ranking. Here the graduate outcomes refers to the numbers of students pass out, Ph.D. awarded for university and median salary for an engineering graduate are some examples of the measure considered, where the outreach and inclusivity refers to the numbers of foreign students, women students etc. The details parameters, their calculation and methodologies are available in their website. The importance of govt. ranking and accrediting agencies is increasing day by day and NIRF is expected to emerge as a guiding framework for millions of students and guardians.