John J. Kennedy | Flexibility on Paper: NEP 2020’s Hidden Hurdles to Student Mobility

John J. Kennedy | Flexibility on Paper: NEP 2020’s Hidden Hurdles to Student Mobility

ABC has expanded rapidly, but data on students actually moving credits between institutions remain limited

Recently, India’s higher education policy promised students something quite attractive: flexibility. A student should be able to move between institutions, change programmes, accumulate credits, and, if necessary, leave education temporarily and return later. The National Education Policy 2020 made this idea central to undergraduate reform. The Academic Bank of Credits (ABC) was created to store credits and facilitate their transfer. As of July 2026, 2,899 higher education institutions were registered on ABC, while more than 700 universities and 6,600 colleges were offering multiple entry and exit options. The idea is commendable. However, the important question now is: How much mobility have students actually acquired?

The latest All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE), for 2023-24, provides a useful starting point. Among 1,278 responding universities, 69 per cent reported registration on ABC, while only 49 per cent reported offering multiple entry and exit. Only four per cent reported collaboration with other institutions for joint degree programmes. What do these figures reveal? Certainly, a gap between digital infrastructure and academic mobility. A student may have an account in a national credit system without having many institutions willing or able to accept the credits earned elsewhere. For mobility to work, credits earned at one institution must be acceptable towards the academic requirements of another. Curricula, course content, assessment, and academic calendars will also have to be compatible.

It may be useful to remember here that under the UGC framework, ABC does not make credit transfer an automatic transaction between databases. Credits can be stored and transferred through the system, but the receiving institution retains a role in determining what can count towards its qualification. This is important because a database can make credits visible without making them portable in practice. Credits earned elsewhere may still fail to satisfy a compulsory academic requirement in a new programme of study.

The latest government data show the scale of the digital system. By July 2026, the 2,899 registered institutions had 4.79 crore APAAR (Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry) IDs mapped to awarding institutions and 9.78 crore credit records mapped to learners. These are significant measures of infrastructure. They are not, however, measures of actual student mobility. The missing statistics are more important: how many students have transferred credits between institutions, how many have used transferred credits to complete a qualification, how many requests were rejected, and why? And here’s where the question of institutional hierarchy comes in. Where acceptance depends on the academic requirements of the receiving institution, students may not experience the same degree of mobility across institutions. However, unless equivalence rules are clear, students from less-resourced institutions could face greater uncertainty about whether their credits will be accepted. This is a possible risk, rather than an established national pattern, but it deserves attention as the system expands.

Portability also has to be balanced with institutional autonomy. Universities need some freedom to decide what counts towards their degrees, but students should be able to know these requirements before they transfer. Clear and publicly available equivalence rules would reduce uncertainty and make credit mobility more predictable.

The economic dimension is equally important. The latest nationwide household survey of education expenditure is from 2017-18. It reported average expenditure on the basic course of general-course students at Rs 5,240 in rural areas and Rs 16,308 in urban areas. For technical and professional courses, the corresponding figures were Rs 32,137 and Rs 64,763. These figures are too old to estimate present costs. They do, however, show why financial and geographical mobility cannot be separated from academic mobility. A student who transfers may have to change cities. That can mean rent, food, transport and hostel expenses. For some families this may be an inconvenience. For others it may make transfer impossible. A formal right to move therefore does not have the same practical value for every student. Flexibility on paper can coexist with limited choice in practice.

There is another assumption worth examining. Mobility need not mean physical movement. Academic mobility can also mean changing programmes, combining courses, using recognised online learning, or pausing study and returning later without losing academic progress. A student should not have to relocate simply to access a different academic pathway. In this sense, the real test of flexibility is not how often students move but how freely they can shape their education. This is particularly important in a system of India’s scale. AISHE 2023-24 recorded 4.50 crore students, 1,289 universities and 48,246 colleges, with the Gross Enrolment Ratio at 30 per cent. Such a large and diverse system cannot easily operate with complete uniformity. Yet some degree of commonality is necessary if credits are to become portable. The policy challenge is to create enough standardisation for portability without making universities interchangeable credit-processing units.

The next stage of reform should, therefore, focus on outcomes rather than registration. The UGC should publish annual data on actual credit transfers, successful use of transferred credits, rejected requests, and the reasons for rejection. Universities should publish clear credit-transfer rules so that students know in advance what will be accepted, what additional requirements they may face, and what a transfer will cost. Flexibility should also not become a substitute for strengthening institutions. Students should have mobility because it expands their academic choices, not because the institution where they began cannot provide them.

There’s no denying that India has built much of this digital infrastructure for student mobility. However, the harder task is academic and social. Until actual usage is measured, it will be difficult to know whether mobility is becoming a lived academic reality or mainly a well-documented digital facility.

P. John J. Kennedy is former professor and dean, Christ University, Bengaluru

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