NIRF at crossroads: How VBSA bill could redefine rankings in higher education overhaul

India’s higher education ecosystem is on the brink of one of its biggest regulatory overhauls in decades. The Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan (VBSA) Bill, 2025, was introduced in Lok Sabha on December 15, 2025. This body will bring together various regulators, like the University Grants Commission (UGC), All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), and National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) into a single framework. The move aligns with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020’s vision for governance that is simplified, transparent, and oriented toward outcomes.

Under the proposed legislation, the VBSA Commission will have three Councils: (i) Regulatory Council, functioning as the common regulator for higher education, (ii) Accreditation Council, overseeing the system of accreditation, and (iii) Standards Council, determining academic standards. The Commission aims to provide a strategic direction for higher education and research, developing a roadmap for transforming higher educational institutions (HEIs) into large multi-disciplinary education and research institutions. It plans to suggest schemes for improving quality of education, ensure coordination among councils, and extend financial support for their effective functioning.

Where does NIRF fit in?

Amid this structural shift, a central question arises: what role will the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) play within the VBSA architecture? With NIRF already established as India’s most visible system of institutional ranking, the leaders of education and policy makers debate the use of NIRFs strengths without undermining its independence or adding unnecessary regulatory burden.

Addressing this concern, the former chairman of UGC, Prof. M. Jagadesh Kumar explained that under VBSA, NIRF will stay methodologically independent. Even as its output will evolve into broader performance indicators for improvement. While VBSA’s new architecture (Regulatory, Accreditation, and Standards Councils) can use NIRF as a public transparency tool, the ranking methodology and algorithm will continue to remain with an independent technical committee. This separation, he explained, is necessary for building trust among stakeholders and promoting genuine quality competition. This approach aligns with the “light but tight” spirit of NEP 2020.

Prof. Anil Dattatraya Sahasrabudhe, Chairman of the Executive Committee, NAAC, said, “Many of the concerns being raised will become clearer only after the establishment of the VBSA, consequent to inputs from the Joint Parliamentary Committee and the passage of the Bill in Parliament. At present, it would be premature to draw definitive conclusions by correlating these issues with VBSA. Until such time, the NIRF will continue to operate independently under the National Board of Accreditation.”

One data platform, better governance

VBSA also proposes a single public disclosure and data-reporting platform that will be common across the regulatory, accreditation, funding, and ranking processes. This would also fit completely into NIRF’s requirements for data, wherein institutions report verified information once instead of repeatedly to various bodies. Thus, the unified digital portal is well-crafted to improve the transparency and efficiency, not to increase the paperwork. Additionally, the concerns around the self-reported data can be managed through periodic audits, verification mechanisms, and cross-check regulations, which will strengthen the overall credibility of the system, says Prof Kumar.

From league tables to assessment ecosystems

Education leaders view this transition as an opportunity to take NIRF beyond a single composite league table. Instead of institutional behaviour being led by rankings via one dominant metric, the reimagined framework allows assessment and accreditation to work in tandem-using a common data backbone but serving different ends.

According to the Prof. (Dr.) O.R.S. Rao Chancellor, ICFAI University, Sikkim, Accreditation under VBSA is expected to be a two-stage model, where binary assessment on whether minimum quality standards are met will be followed by maturity-based grading. The latter reflects institutional development over time. Rankings become, in turn, a comparative form of assessment to help stakeholders interpret performance rather than enforce compliance.

An important innovation being developed involves choice-based or use-based rankings; that is, the same verified dataset can be looked at from different perspectives. Students might prioritise teaching quality and placements, funding agencies might emphasize research impact, and lenders might look at employability and financial outcomes.

Allowing users to attribute relevance to indicators turns rankings into informational tools rather than blunt regulatory instruments.

Addressing scale, diversity, and autonomy

Prof. Kumar also mentioned that the higher education system in India consists of over 1,200 universities and thousands of colleges, enrolling more than 4.5 crore students today. The policymakers believe that the legacy regulatory mechanisms are incapable of governing scale and diversity at this level, one of the key drivers for the comprehensive overhaul called for by NEP 2020.

Prof. Rao says that the system encompasses INIs, central and state universities, private institutions, and teaching-focused colleges, with fundamentally different missions. Any valid ranking system, therefore, should be based on the benchmarking of institutions within comparable peer groups, and not across diverse contexts.

Prof. Rao encapsulated that NIRF already reflects this direction through multiple categories and discipline-related parameters. The VBSA is likely to deepen this further, with clearer institutional categorisation that ensures newer or teaching-oriented institutions are not judged against long-established research universities.

Academic concerns over metric-driven control

Not all voices are convinced that integration will preserve autonomy. Ranking and accreditation serve fundamentally different purposes and must not be conflated, warned Saumen Chattopadhyay, Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

“Accreditation focuses on institutional processes, while rankings like NIRF are output-oriented,” he said. “NIRF emerged because global rankings overemphasised research, for which many Indian institutions were, and still are not fully prepared.

Prof. Chattopadhyay expressed apprehensions that NIRF indicators are increasingly aligned with policy priorities of the Ministry of Education, thereby turning rankings into indirect regulatory instruments. “Changing indicators and weightages effectively motivate institutions toward implementing policy reforms, much like preparing to take a predefined examination,” he said.

He added that a consolidated data framework may boost transparency but simultaneously threatens to over-engineer academic evaluation. He contended that a metric-driven assessment discourages high-risk interdisciplinary research in the social sciences and humanities, where impact often cannot be captured using citation-based indicators. “Indian Knowledge Systems, if they are to be globally credible, must evolve through rigorous scholarship and international engagement, not metrics alone,” he said.

Centralisation, funding cuts and commercialisation

Prof. Pankaj Kumar Garg, Chairman, Indian National Teachers’ Congress, said, “Viewed in relation to the proposed VBSA framework, the repositioning of NIRF is not a quality reform but a more profound structural shift. Centralisation may align universities’ priorities away from their public mission toward compliance, standardisation, and reputational performance-with long-term implications for diversity, institutional freedom, and the public character of Indian higher education.”

Dr. Achal Agrawal, Founder of India Research Watch, said, “A single national data architecture for VBSA may improve some consistency, but credibility will depend on robust auditing, investigation of outliers, and open independent verification of the institutional data. Self-reported data without strong oversight threaten to undermine trust further. Metric-driven rankings have already incentivised institutions to optimise for indicators rather than research quality or scholarly outcomes. This tendency has fostered superficial, lower-quality research-especially in burgeoning domains such as Indian Knowledge Systems and Sustainable Development Goals-where quantity is rewarded at the expense of methodological rigour.”

In this new system, smaller and newer institutions are structurally disadvantaged; similarly, India’s specialised institutional ecosystem is ill-suited to universal, one-size-fits-all ranking models-be it for global or domestic use. What is required is not incremental adjustments but a fundamental redesign of the NIRF. That some institutions have shown ostensibly high performance in the NIRF and global rankings despite rising research misconduct indicates that rankings have not served as a deterrent to unethical research practices. Retraction penalties are a step forward, but unless significantly strengthened, they address symptoms rather than the root causes of the problem, he added.

(Uttkarsha Shekhar is an independent journalist whose interests span defence, science, environment, education, entertainment and fashion.)

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