Whose Knowledge, What Standard? Quality Assurance and the Rapid Institutionalization of Indian Knowledge Systems under NEP 2020

Abstract

Since 2020, India's National Education Policy has driven a rapid institutional expansion of Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) in higher education: a dedicated IKS Division was established within the All India Council for Technical Education, the University Grants Commission has mandated that undergraduate and postgraduate students earn at least 5% of their credits from IKS courses, and dozens of IKS research centres and teacher-training centres have been funded across the country. This paper examines whether the quality-assurance architecture accompanying this expansion is proportionate to its scale and to the epistemic claims involved. Drawing on primary regulatory documents, official IKS Division materials, and investigative and scientific journalism documenting specific implementation controversies, the paper argues that India's existing higher-education quality-assurance apparatus, built around institutional and programme-level accreditation, was not designed to and does not currently perform content-level peer review of individual IKS courses, creating a structural gap between the evidentiary standards stated in UGC guidelines and what is demonstrably being taught in some funded courses. The paper treats this as a policy-design problem rather than a verdict on Indian Knowledge Systems as a field of scholarship, and it proposes specific, implementable quality-assurance mechanisms, including subject-expert peer review panels, transparent syllabus publication, and closer engagement with existing scientific and historical academies, that could close this gap without abandoning NEP 2020's underlying commitment to integrating India's intellectual heritage into contemporary education.