Union Cabinet’s Landmark Education Reform is Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhikshan Bill, Maruthi Prasad Kavuri Explains
The Union Cabinet’s approval of the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhikshan Bill (VBSAB) on December 12, 2025, marks a watershed moment in India’s higher education governance. The bill, introduced in Parliament on December 15, represents the most comprehensive restructuring of the regulatory architecture since the UGC’s establishment in 1956. However, the actual framework diverges materially from some circulating narratives, warranting a detailed factual examination of what the legislation actually proposes.
The Dissolution of Legacy Regulators
The bill repeals three foundational acts that have governed India’s higher education for decades: the University Grants Commission Act (1956), the All India Council for Technical Education Act (1987), and the National Council for Teacher Education Act (1993). This dissolution eliminates the chairmen positions of these bodies, centralizing regulatory authority under a single apex structure—a direct response to the National Education Policy 2020’s critique of fragmented oversight and duplicative compliance burdens.
Critical Clarification: Claims circulating on social media assert that the Pharmacy Council of India (PCI) is being dissolved under this bill. This is inaccurate. The PCI is not addressed in the VBSAB. However, a separate legislative effort—the draft National Pharmacy Commission Bill 2023—proposes establishing a National Pharmacy Commission to replace the PCI, reflecting longstanding institutional concerns about pharmacy regulation. These are distinct legislative initiatives.
The most significant factual discrepancy concerns the number and composition of councils. While several social media messages claim the establishment of four councils (NHERC, NAC, HEGC, and GEC), the official bill establishes three autonomous councils under the VBSAB umbrella:
1. Viksit Bharat Shiksha Viniyaman Parishad (Regulatory Council)
Responsible for institutional approval, compliance monitoring, and enforcement.
2. Viksit Bharat Shiksha Gunvatta Parishad (Accreditation Council)
Functions as the independent accrediting authority across all accreditation verticals.
3. Viksit Bharat Shiksha Manak Parishad (Standards Council)
Sets minimum academic standards and learning outcomes across higher education.
The National Education Policy 2020 had originally envisioned a fourth body—the Higher Education Grants Council (HEGC)—to separately manage funding decisions. However, the government decided not to establish this separate entity, reasoning that education financing comes through multiple channels. Instead, funding allocation decisions remain with the Ministry of Education, with the regulatory council’s assessments serving as inputs for performance-linked grant disbursement.
Each council will comprise a President and up to 14 members, appointed through a search-and-selection committee process, ensuring representation from state institutions, technical experts, and government nominees. This structure embeds institutional autonomy safeguards through multi-stakeholder governance, though critics argue insufficient representation from the autonomous institution sector.
The accreditation overhaul represents the bill’s most operationally significant component. The new system operates in two stages:
Step 1: Binary Accreditation
Institutions receive a binary determination: Accredited or Not Accredited. This aligns with international best practices used by accreditation bodies across the United States, Europe, and other major education systems.
Step 2: Maturity-Based Graded Levels (MBGL)
For accredited institutions, performance is stratified across five levels:
- Level 1: Emerging – Entry-level accreditation
- Level 2: Developing – Progressive improvement phase
- Level 3: Established – Institutional stability and consistent standards
- Level 4: Advanced – Excellence in specific disciplines
- Level 5: Global Readiness – International competitive standing
This framework incentivizes continuous institutional improvement while maintaining clear differentiation between compliant and non-compliant institutions.
The Integration of NAAC and NBA
The bill consolidates two historically independent accreditation bodies—the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) and the National Board of Accreditation (NBA)—as discipline-specific verticals within the Accreditation Council. This integration is architecturally significant because it maintains program-level accreditation rigor while eliminating institutional duplication.
Within this integrated structure, discipline-specific verticals will operate autonomously for:
- Engineering (aligned with the Washington Accord framework of outcome-based education)
- Pharmacy
- Architecture
- Management and Business Schools
- Hotel Management and Hospitality
- Other recognized professional programs
For engineering specifically, the integration preserves outcome-based education (OBE) principles and score-based accreditation protocols that align with the Washington Accord, ensuring international portability of Indian engineering qualifications. The framework maintains NBA’s technical rigor while eliminating the administrative complexity of separate institutional and program accreditation by different bodies.
The bill explicitly excludes medical and legal education from VBSAB oversight, preserving existing regulatory structures:
- Medical Education remains under the National Medical Commission (NMC)
- Legal Education remains under the Bar Council of India (BCI)
- Architecture is governed by the Council of Architecture (CoA), which functions as a Professional Standard Setting Body within the VBSAB framework
This carve-out reflects both the specialized nature of professional medical and legal training and political consensus around maintaining established regulatory structures for these professions. The architecture profession occupies a middle position—remaining professionally regulated by CoA while aligned with the broader VBSAB coordination mechanism.
Perhaps the most disruptive operational change is the shift to technology-driven, faceless regulatory processes. The VBSAB framework mandates establishment of a “One Nation One Data Platform” with integrated stakeholder validation and mandatory public disclosure protocols.
Level 1 Accreditation: Fully Digital
Institutions seeking entry-level accreditation will undergo entirely digital assessment processes with no physical on-campus visits or manual inspections. Evaluation occurs through data dashboards and institutional performance metrics submitted through the regulatory council’s public portal. This approach significantly reduces discretionary judgment in preliminary accreditation, creating an objective, auditable trail.
Mandatory Public Portal Disclosure
Higher education institutions must publicly disclose:
- Governance structures and decision-making procedures
- Audited financial statements and asset declarations
- Faculty qualifications, experience, and credentials
- Academic program curricula and learning outcomes
- Institutional research performance metrics
- Student success and employment metrics
This data infrastructure serves dual purposes: it establishes the evidentiary basis for accreditation decisions while creating unprecedented transparency that enables students, parents, and employers to make informed institutional choices.
Contrary to NEP 2020’s original vision of a separate funding council, the VBSAB framework positions funding authority firmly with the Ministry of Education. While the regulatory council itself has no budgetary powers, the framework establishes a performance feedback mechanism: institutional assessments and accreditation levels will inform the quantum of grants distributed to centrally-funded higher education institutions.
This represents a recalibration of the 1956 UGC model, which combined regulatory approval, accreditation, and funding allocation under a single authority. The new architecture separates these functions—a change intended to reduce conflicts of interest and improve targeting of public resources, though critics contend it could make funding allocation subject to political considerations if separated from technical regulatory authority.
The bill has been introduced in the Lok Sabha and referred to a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) for detailed scrutiny—a procedural step that acknowledges the legislation’s scope and contested elements. The JPC process will enable detailed review of implementation mechanisms, including:
- The search-and-selection committee composition and process
- Detailed regulations for the digital accreditation platform
- Funding allocation formulas and performance metrics
- Timeline for dissolution of existing bodies and transition of personnel
- Mechanisms for safeguarding institutional autonomy for IITs, IIMs, NITs, and other national importance institutions
Institutional Autonomy and IITs/IIMs Protection
The bill explicitly preserves the existing autonomy levels of Institutions of National Importance—IITs, IIMs, NITs, and other designated establishments. These institutions will continue to operate under their existing governance frameworks while remaining coordinated within the broader VBSAB ecosystem.
For Institutions: The shift to digital-first accreditation will require significant investments in data management systems and institutional transparency infrastructure. The binary+maturity grading system creates clearer pathways for quality improvement but eliminates numeric scoring that some institutions had previously gamed.
For Faculty and Students: Outcome-based program design becomes mandatory rather than optional, emphasizing measurable skill acquisition aligned with industry and societal needs. Public performance metrics may enhance institutional accountability but could also create gaming behaviors around data collection.
For the Regulatory Ecosystem: The unification eliminates institutional memory fragmentation and enables coherent policy direction. However, the absence of a separate funding body creates potential misalignment between regulatory recommendations and financial incentives.
Critical Limitations and Open Questions
- Implementation Rigor: Digital systems require robust IT infrastructure and cybersecurity frameworks not yet detailed in public documents.
- Federal-State Coordination: State higher education institutions constitute a significant portion of India’s higher education landscape, yet the bill’s mechanisms for state government participation in council governance remain underdeveloped.
- Transition Management: Moving three large institutional bureaucracies (UGC, AICTE, NCTE) into a unified structure requires detailed transition planning not yet publicly articulated.
- International Recognition: Maintaining Washington Accord alignment for engineering while integrating NAAC and NBA requires careful governance of discipline-specific standards.
The VBSAB represents genuine structural reform, not merely administrative consolidation. However, the actual design—particularly the three-council structure and the decision to keep funding authority with the ministry—differs materially from both the NEP 2020’s original framework and various social media interpretations. Success will depend on implementation precision, institutional cooperation, and whether the performance-linked funding mechanism creates incentives for genuine quality improvement or becomes subject to bureaucratic and political pressures.
