Four years after the National Education Policy (NEP) set out to transform India’s higher education system, the government’s flagship survey has, for the first time, asked universities to report how far they have progressed on some of the policy’s key reforms. The responses, tucked away in a two-page section of the AISHE 2023-24 report rather than its headline findings, paint a mixed picture of implementation, suggesting that while several institutions have adopted policy frameworks, many structural reforms are yet to take root.Of the 1,278 universities that responded to this new NEP-tracking module, only 65% report having a functioning Research and Development Cell. That leaves roughly 447 universities, more than a third of India’s entire university system, without a basic institutional structure for research, four academic years into a policy built substantially around research and innovation. Fewer still, 59%, have an Incubation Centre. Only 43% have adopted SWAYAM regulations for credit-based online learning. Just 26% report any collaboration with a foreign higher education institution.
The numbers get starker when the survey moves from infrastructure to actual reform. “Curriculum and Credit Framework” implementation, one of NEP’s central architectural ideas, is reported by AISHE as 0% adopted. So is “cross-disciplinary departments incorporated”, the policy’s signature promise to dissolve rigid subject silos. So is “internship or apprenticeship embedded degree programmes”, meant to be a default feature of the undergraduate experience under NEP. Three of the policy’s most publicised structural reforms, according to the universities’ own self-reporting, have essentially not happened anywhere.
It is not that universities have ignored NEP altogether. Adoption looks healthy wherever the ask is closer to paperwork than structural change: 69% of universities are registered on the Academic Bank of Credits, and 58% say they have adopted the National Curriculum and Credit Framework for undergraduate programmes at a policy level. But that 58% collapses when the question shifts from “have you adopted the framework” to “have you actually built curriculum and credit systems around it”, where the number falls to zero. The gap between what universities have signed onto and what they have actually built is, in itself, the story.Ranking exercises tell a similar story of quiet non-participation
Only 55% of India’s universities took part in the NIRF ranking exercise this cycle, the government’s own primary framework for ranking institutions. That means 45% of universities, roughly 575 of them, sat out the ranking exercise altogether. Only 15% have participated in any international ranking. For a policy environment that has made rankings central to how institutions are judged and funded, more than four in ten universities are simply not in the conversation.
The research numbers nobody has put a timeframe on
The same NEP module also asked universities to self-report their research output: 24,306 active MoUs for research collaboration, 24,887 government-sponsored research projects, 13,897 industry-sponsored projects, 34,901 patents, 5,89,542 research publications, and 10,097 startups, all reported nationally for the first time in this format. These are large, headline-friendly numbers, and they will likely be the ones that get quoted. But the report does not specify whether they are cumulative totals built up since each institution’s founding, or figures from a defined reporting period, an ambiguity that changes what these numbers actually mean and one the Department of Higher Education should be asked to clarify before any of them are used as evidence of a single year’s research momentum.
Why this should matter to campus leadership, not just policymakers
Most coverage of AISHE data speaks to policymakers and the general public: enrolment is up, GER is up, the system is growing. This particular dataset speaks directly to a different audience: vice-chancellors and deans benchmarking their own institution’s NEP compliance against a national baseline for the first time, and faculty making the case internally for investment in research infrastructure, industry linkage or incubation support. A university with no R&D cell is not an outlier; it is one of roughly 447 in the same position. A university that has not built a genuine credit-based curriculum framework is, on this data, in the overwhelming majority. That reframes what “NEP implementation” actually looks like on the ground, four years in, far more usefully than any single national percentage can.
