QUALITY, EQUITY, AND AUTONOMY IN INDIAN HIGHER EDUCATION AFTER NEP 2020: A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT

The National Education Policy of 2020 is often called the biggest shake-up of Indian higher education since 1986. It asks for a lot: multidisciplinary campuses in place of narrow single-subject colleges, credit-based movement between programmes, far more freedom for institutions to run themselves, and, at the same time, a real widening of access for groups who have historically been left out. This paper looks closely at three strands of that agenda - quality, equity, and institutional autonomy - using government reports, statutory documents, and the wider research literature as evidence. The argument is straightforward. NEP 2020's vision hangs together well on paper. Putting it into practice is another matter, given how unevenly resources and administrative capacity are spread across Indian states, and given inequalities that were there long before this policy existed. There is also a basic tension running through the reform: it wants institutions to be freer, yet the government still has to pay for most of what happens in this sector and still has to watch over it. What decides whether NEP 2020 succeeds, this paper suggests, will not be the elegance of the document itself but whether money, coordination between the Centre and the States, and careful, ground-level implementation actually follow.