2025 for Education: VBSA Bill, CBSE board exams, NAAC accreditation scam – big policies, bigger controversies

Here’s a quick review of the major decisions that made the news in 2025.

VBSA Bill: Old wine, old bottle, new label

Of all the reforms and changes promised in the National Education Policy (NEP 2020), this is perhaps the biggest. A lightly-tweaked version of the much-criticised Higher Education Commission of India Bill from 2018 has reappeared as the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhisthan Bill 2025. Like the old bill, and following NEP and other policy prescriptions, it seeks to replace the University Grants Commission (UGC), All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) with a single body.

The shock-and-awe method of introducing the bill – Cabinet clearing it on a weekend at the fag end of the winter session, draft reaching members of parliament on a Sunday evening, a last-minute “supplementary list of business” the next day – didn’t work as effectively as for the one restructuring MNREGA. The VBSA is now with a joint parliamentary committee which will discuss it till the end of February.

There is no indication, however, of the government backing down from its most controversial positions – the bill takes education funding away from the control of the regulator and proposes a commission largely staffed by central appointees with zero representation from teachers and limited representation from states. Under VBSA Bill, the chairman position becomes honorary and the requirement that they not be an employee of the central or any state government has been dropped.

UGC draft rules for teachers: Permanently on contract

The frenetic pace of regulation framing at the UGC slowed after the first few months of 2025 with the end of M Jagadesh Kumar’s tenure as chairman. The post is now held by the higher education secretary, Vineet Joshi, as an additional charge.

But the UGC opened the year with draft regulations on recruitment of academic staff – from assistant professors to VCs.

The draft regulations added a list of ‘notable contributions’, unrelated to classroom teaching, to factors that will count toward promotions. They removed the “academic performance indicator” system of recruitment. Most importantly, they removed the cap on the presence of contract teachers in an institution.

Also Read | DU axe on Indian languages in BA Programme over empty seats; teachers blame CUET, vacancies

NAAC’s F grade

The National Assessment cum Accreditation Council was already up for reform when it distinguished itself in early February by landing in a Central Bureau of Investigation case. Ten individuals, including members of a NAAC inspection committee, were arrested for seeking bribes from a private deemed-to-be university in Andhra Pradesh in exchange for high grades. The bribery scandal led to NAAC stopping the accreditation process for several months and changing the rules for inspection committees.

Broader reforms, such as the binary accreditation system, are yet to be implemented. NAAC announced grades for new cycles as per the old format even in December.

State Education: Governor in the works

The conflict between the union government and opposition-run states has thrown large sections of the state education apparatus into crisis. It has also led to protracted court cases.

The union government continues to withhold Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan funds from some states, including West Bengal, due to their refusal to sign the agreement on PM SHRI schools. Tamil Nadu managed to get SSA funds out after a court battle; Kerala agreed to sign the agreement and then reneged, pausing the roll-out of the scheme.

Similar court battles have been launched over the appointment of vice-chancellors in state universities. In 2025, West Bengal and Kerala saw some resolution and appointment of VCs through a process mediated by the courts but in Tamil Nadu, the stalemate continues and to disastrous effect. The 10 bills passed by the TN assembly, most of them related to education, continue to be pending with the governor, RN Ravi, with the Supreme Court remarking that it’s not possible to impose deadlines for ratifying laws.

At least two states that have rejected the NEP published policies of their own. These include Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

Also Read | Governor as Chancellor: Colonial-era role being used to 'choke' universities in opposition states

Private, foreign universities

Unrelated to the political tussle between the centre and states, Haryana has used the Al Falah University controversy to seize greater control over state private universities.

The state government can fully take over a university and shut it down over “anti-national activities” and national security concerns. The Haryana Private Universities (Amendment) Bill has cleared the state assembly. Haryana, especially its Gurugram and Sonepat districts, have a number of India’s best-known private universities. Al Falah University is in Faridabad and several doctors in its medical college were allegedly involved in planning and executing the Red Fort Blast in early November.

Then, 2025 was also a banner year for foreign universities looking to set up campuses in India. The ministry of education issued letters of intent to over a dozen, most of them Australian and UK universities, to set up campuses in Mumbai, Greater Noida, Delhi, Bengaluru and other cities. Earlier this month, the NITI Aayog proposed more foreign university campuses as part of its internationalisation roadmap.

But how ‘international’ are these foreign university campuses really? Careers360 reported on the first two in GIFT City Gujarat which, together, had managed to admit just 60 students for the first batch, most of them from Gujarat and Maharashtra.

Indian universities have been much slower in setting up off campus centres. In 2025, Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad opened its first abroad. IIM Ahmedabad Dubai opened in September with 35 students.

CBSE: Doubling down on exams

Some of the reforms will show their impact in 2026. A key one is the Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE) decision to hold two rounds of the Class 10 exams. The first lot will be held in 2026. Several state boards have followed in its footsteps. West Bengal tried – and appears to have pulled off – semester-wise board exams.

Further, the autonomous exam body under the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), Parakh, declared the result of the mammoth large-scale assessment test, Parakh Rashtriya Sarvekshan. The body is also pushing state education boards toward assessment reforms.

In other school news, Delhi finally has a law on school fee regulation, just not one that’s likely to be very effective in actually controlling fee hikes.

5 years of NEP 2020

Five years on, it is safe to say NEP’s prescriptions on monitoring, deregulation and digitalisation have been implemented more successfully – and swiftly – than the ones on academics.

Its promise of choice and flexibility has been stymied by infrastructure and staff shortage or yielded poor-quality courses that are ultimately a waste of time. In Delhi University, at least, the fourth year of the four-year undergraduate programme (FYUP), has led to chaos and confusion. At no point was the strain of massive reform on an under-resourced system felt more acutely than during DU’s semester exams in December as papers for over 35 exams failed to reach students on time.

While the NEP suggests resolving all the regulators and professional councils into one, the VBSA Bill brings just one council – for architecture – within the ambit of the new super regulator. Law, medicine and allied sciences remain outside its purview.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) has imposed a three-year ban on new law schools and expansion of existing ones due to the “unchecked mushrooming of sub-standard institutions”.

The year also saw the new regulator for allied health sciences – the National Commission for Allied and Healthcare Professions (NCAHP) – settle into its role. The NCAHP has prescribed curriculum standards for allied healthcare professions, banned distance education for several disciplines – with grave consequences for psychology students – and insisted on the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET UG) as the main selection criterion for admission to several programmes.

However, formal regulation of the sector will likely curb the uncontrolled proliferation of fake courses, colleges, even regulators in allied healthcare.

Much of what 2025 has brought by way of major policy decisions has been criticised and resisted by the very stakeholders they were intended for – teachers and students. If 2026 will see the new policies finalised and their impact, it will also witness the quality of resistance.