Academic Bank of Credits in India: Structure, Implementation, Benefits, Challenges and Global Comparisons

The Academic Bank of Credits (ABC) is the credit-account mechanism created under India’s National Education Policy 2020 and given legal form by the University Grants Commission Regulations, 2021. It is not the same thing as the surrounding digital public infrastructure. APAAR supplies a persistent learner identity, DigiLocker a document vault, and the National Academic Depository an official store of awards; ABC is the account in which credits may be accumulated, transferred, and redeemed. This paper examines the gap between that legal design and the conditions required for academic mobility in a stratified higher education system. The study is a qualitative documentary analysis, not an implementation survey. Official instruments were read first; operational guidance on NAD, Digilocker, and APAAR second; scholarly and comparative texts third. The analysis finds that ABC has advanced furthest as a national record: identity linkage, award deposit, and mandated registration are specified in operative detail. It has advanced least as a mobility regime. Portability of the file is decoupled from academic recognition, especially by the parent-institution rule that keeps a substantial share of the award with the home HEI. Digital architecture meets verification conditions more readily than pathway conditions. Equivalence across unequal curricula remains unspecified, which makes elite institutional resistance a structural response rather than a delay. The same Aadhaar-mediated access that authenticates the record also filters who can use it. ABC should therefore be evaluated by completed academic acts—accepted transfers, usable exit credentials, recognised combinations of learning—not by IDs issued. The paper does not claim that the reform has transformed Indian higher education. It claims that the objectives already written into NEP and the 2021 Regulations remain only partly actionable because their academic and institutional conditions were assumed rather than secured.