EDUNEWS & VIEWS
Is Something Really Wrong With India’s Education System?
From NEET paper leaks to education spending and ASER learning outcomes, here’s what the data reveals about the strengths and weaknesses of India’s education system.
A Sonam Wangchuk hunger strike over exam leaks has put education back in the headlines. The data underneath the headlines tells a more complicated story about India’s education system than any single protest can.
On a hot July afternoon at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi, Sonam Wangchuk sat on an indefinite hunger strike for the third week running. The Ladakhi educationist, known for decades of quiet work on schooling in the trans-Himalayan region long before he became a familiar face on the evening news, was not protesting for Ladakh this time. He was protesting for something that touches every Indian household with a child preparing for a competitive exam: the integrity of the system that decides who gets to become a doctor, an engineer, or a civil servant.
His demand was blunt — the resignation of the Union Education Minister, over the repeated leaking of question papers, most recently NEET-UG. By mid-July, doctors at Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital had moved him in for observation as his health declined. Whatever one makes of the politics around him, the strike forced a question into the open that has been sitting quietly under the surface for years: is something actually wrong with Indian education, or is this one more news cycle that will pass once the cameras move on?
The honest answer, once you sit with the numbers, is both. Some things are visibly getting better. Others have been broken for so long that the system now treats the brokenness as normal.
India’s Education System Is at a Crossroads
Start with the trigger for Wangchuk’s protest, because it is the most visible symptom. In May 2026, the National Testing Agency did something it had never done before — it cancelled NEET-UG itself, the exam held on 3 May, after a leak scandal, and handed the matter to the CBI. It was not the first time. NEET’s predecessor, AIPMT, was scrapped entirely in 2015 after the Supreme Court called it a national shame. NEET 2024 produced 67 students with a perfect score of 720 out of 720, an anomaly that triggered nationwide protests; the Supreme Court eventually let the exam stand but ordered a limited re-test for 1,563 candidates after acknowledging that at least 155 students had directly benefited from a leak in Bihar. Independent tallies of major recruitment and entrance exams — NEET, UGC-NET, state police and teacher-eligibility tests among them — count at least eight to a dozen serious leak episodes between 2024 and 2026 alone.
This is not a story about one exam or one government. It is a story about what happens when a country tries to sort tens of millions of young people through a small number of high-stakes gates, using an examination infrastructure that has not kept pace with the scale of demand it is asked to manage. Roughly 2.3 million candidates sit for NEET each year. When the gate itself cannot be trusted, the damage is not abstract — it lands on families who spent years and savings preparing a child for a fair shot.
The Money Question Nobody Quite Answers
Wangchuk’s protest is about exams, but the deeper argument about Indian education has always been about money — specifically, how much of it the state is willing to commit.
In 1966, the Kothari Commission recommended that India spend 6 percent of GDP on education. Sixty years on, the country has never got there. The Economic Survey’s own figures show total education spending — centre and states combined — sliding from 2.8 percent of GDP in 2017-19 to 2.7 percent in 2021-22, before edging back to around 2.9 percent more recently. The Union Budget for 2026-27 gave education its largest rupee allocation ever, ₹1,39,289 crore, split roughly ₹83,562 crore for schools and ₹55,727 crore for higher education. The headline sounds generous. But measured against a Union Budget that has itself grown to over ₹53 lakh crore, education’s share has actually shrunk — down to about 2.6 percent of the total outlay, compared with roughly 3 percent a few budgets ago. The rupee number grows every year; the priority, measured as a share of what the country spends on everything else, has been quietly declining.
Compare this with what other economies do. Developed nations typically spend upward of 10 percent of GDP on education when private and public spending are combined; India’s combined centre-state figure sits closer to 4-5 percent, and the Union government’s own direct spending is a much smaller sliver of that. This is the least politically charged number in the whole debate — it has stayed roughly the same distance from the 6 percent target under governments of every stripe. That consistency is itself a data point: underfunding education relative to ambition is not a partisan failure, it is a structural one.
Where the National Education Policy actually stands
Much of the reform activity in Indian education over the last five years has been an attempt to implement the National Education Policy of 2020, the third such policy since Independence and the first sweeping rewrite of school and higher education since 1986. It is worth pausing on where that project actually stands, because the honest picture is split down the middle: the school-level changes are running roughly on schedule, while the bigger institutional promises in higher education are not.
On the school side, the old 10+2 structure has been replaced by the 5+3+3+4 framework — foundational, preparatory, middle and secondary stages — and the National Curriculum Framework for School Education, which spells out what each stage is meant to teach, was notified in 2023. The push for mother-tongue or regional-language instruction up to Class 5 is underway, unevenly, across states. Crucially, the foundational literacy and numeracy campaign under NIPUN Bharat is the same effort ASER 2024 credited for the reading and arithmetic gains described later in this piece — which suggests that where NEP’s school-level reforms have actually reached classrooms, the data backs them up.
Higher education tells a different story. The Academic Bank of Credits, which lets students bank and transfer credits across institutions, is operational and covers more than 620 universities. The Common University Entrance Test is in its sixth year and now draws over 25 lakh applicants. The four-year undergraduate degree with multiple entry and exit points has been adopted by most central universities, though state universities have been slower, citing faculty shortages and infrastructure gaps. Three foreign university campuses are now running on Indian soil under the new rules.
But NEP’s central institutional promise — a single Higher Education Commission of India to replace the UGC, AICTE, NCTE and the tangle of professional councils that currently regulate different corners of higher education — has not materialised. A bill to create it was introduced in 2024 and lapsed without being passed. The UGC and AICTE continue to function exactly as they did before the policy was announced. And the policy’s own financial ask has not been met either: NEP 2020 revives the same 6 percent of GDP figure the Kothari Commission proposed in 1966, while actual spending sits closer to 2.9 to 3.2 percent — the policy, in other words, inherited the funding gap rather than closing it.
There is a federal dimension to this too, worth noting without taking a side in it. Tamil Nadu, Kerala and West Bengal have resisted the three-language formula and declined to sign the MoUs required for the PM-SHRI school scheme, arguing the conditions attached amount to a central mandate on a subject the Constitution places on the Concurrent List, shared between the Centre and the states. The Centre, in turn, withheld Samagra Shiksha funds from states that did not sign, a decision Tamil Nadu has contested in the Supreme Court. Whatever the merits on either side, it illustrates a structural reality that any national education reform in India has to work through: education is not one government’s to redesign alone, and disagreements over pace and design are, in some sense, built into the system rather than a sign that the system has failed.
What that money buys — or doesn’t
Numbers on spending, and on policy intent, only matter if they translate into what children in a classroom actually know. Here the picture, to its credit, is not uniformly grim.
The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2024, which surveys reading and arithmetic among roughly 6.5 lakh rural children, found the sharpest improvement in learning outcomes since 2022 — the biggest gains coming, notably, in government rather than private schools. The share of Class 3 government-school students able to read a Class 2-level text rose from 16.3 percent to 23.4 percent between 2022 and 2024, and those able to do subtraction jumped from about 20 percent to nearly 28 percent over the same period.
Read that again, though, and the improvement looks smaller against the baseline it started from. Even after this recovery, roughly three in four Class 3 students still cannot read a simple Class 2-level passage, and about two in three Class 3 students and seven in ten Class 5 students still struggle with basic arithmetic. This is the uncomfortable middle ground Indian education sits in: real, measurable progress, layered on top of a foundational learning crisis so deep that “progress” still leaves most children behind grade level.
Teachers: more of them, but not where they are needed
The government’s own UDISE+ data, released this year, shows school education crossing a symbolic threshold — over 1.02 crore teachers nationwide, up from 94.8 lakh just three years earlier. Pupil-teacher ratios have improved across every level and now sit comfortably inside the 30:1 ceiling the National Education Policy recommends. Dropout rates have fallen too: at the secondary level, from 8.2 percent in 2024-25 to 7 percent in 2025-26; at the preparatory level, from 2.3 percent to 1.8 percent over the same year.
Set against this, a Parliamentary Standing Committee report flagged something the aggregate numbers hide — vacancy rates of 30 to 50 percent in central schools like Kendriya Vidyalayas and Navodaya Vidyalayas, and roughly 10 lakh unfilled teaching posts in Samagra Shiksha-funded state schools, more than 7.5 lakh of them at the elementary level. A national average can look healthy while entire school networks remain understaffed. The pattern recurs across almost every education indicator in India: the country-wide figure moves in the right direction while the distribution underneath it stays deeply uneven, with rural districts, tribal blocks and a handful of states consistently carrying the shortfall.
Higher education’s arithmetic problem
Beyond school, the picture gets harder still. The Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education — the share of 18-to-23-year-olds actually enrolled — has climbed from around 24 percent a decade ago to roughly 32-33 percent now. NITI Aayog has said India would need something like 2,500 universities to hit the NEP’s own target of 50 percent GER by 2035; at the current pace of institution-building, that target looks out of reach. India has fewer than 1,400 registered universities today, expanding at a rate that will not double, let alone nearly triple, in time.
The other pillar, told through the same numbers
Education rarely gets discussed alongside its natural twin, but the comparison is instructive precisely because it shows the pattern is not confined to schools and colleges. India’s public health spending has hovered around 1.9 to 2 percent of GDP for years, still short of the National Health Policy’s own 2.5 percent target that was supposed to be met by 2025. The global benchmark the World Health Organization points to for universal health coverage is 5 percent; the worldwide average is closer to 6.7 percent. Union government health spending as a share of GDP has actually fallen in recent budgets even as state governments have picked up more of the load — a near-exact echo of what is happening with education, where rupee totals rise while their share of national output and of the total budget quietly slips.
Put the two pillars side by side and a single story emerges, not of neglect exactly, but of a state that keeps announcing bigger numbers while the underlying commitment — measured against the size of the economy and the scale of need — stays roughly where it always was.
So, is something wrong?
Depending on which slice of data you hold up, you can tell two honest but very different stories about Indian education. One is a story of undeniable movement: more teachers, better pupil-teacher ratios, falling dropout rates, rising rural learning scores, a school system now generating one of the largest integrated education databases anywhere in the world through UDISE+. The other is a story of a system that still asks millions of families to gamble their child’s future on an exam whose integrity keeps failing, that has never come close to the funding levels its own commissions recommended sixty years ago, and where a majority of ten-year-olds still cannot read a book meant for eight-year-olds.
Both stories are true at once. That is, in fact, the most accurate way to describe where Indian education stands in 2026 — not collapsing, not thriving, but a system whose gains keep getting undercut by the parts nobody has fixed for decades: chronic underfunding relative to ambition, an examination architecture that has not scaled with demand, and a persistent gap between what the national average shows and what a child in an under-resourced district actually experiences.
Wangchuk’s hunger strike will end, one way or another, and the news cycle will move to something else. The data underneath it will still be there, largely unchanged, waiting for whoever is willing to look at it honestly — not as a political weapon, but as an unfinished national project that both major pillars of any developing country, education and health, still deserve.
Sources: UDISE+ 2025-26 Report (Ministry of Education);ASER 2024 (Pratham/ASER Centre); Economic Survey 2024-25 and 2025-26; Union Budget documents 2026-27; Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education reports; NITI Aayog statements on higher education; National Health Policy 2017 and WHO benchmarks on health financing;
Climate
Environmental Literacy, Not Tree Planting, Is What India’s Schools Need
Awareness is not the same as literacy — and India’s classrooms are still teaching the former
Planting trees and organising awareness campaigns are valuable, but they cannot replace environmental literacy. As climate change increasingly shapes everyday life, India’s schools must teach students how environmental systems, public policy and sustainability are interconnected.
Every year, schools across India mark World Environment Day with the same rituals. Children plant saplings, make posters, join cleanliness drives, and pledge to “save the environment.” A photograph is taken, a few speeches are made, and the saplings are watered for a week or two before the event winds down and environmental education slips back to the margins of the curriculum. There is nothing wrong with planting trees. The concern is what happens when tree-planting, poster-making and occasional awareness drives become the whole of environmental education: children end up with a dangerously thin understanding of the environmental forces that already govern their lives.
India’s environmental problems are no longer confined to the classroom or the textbook. Heatwaves have thrown school timetables out of kilter. Air pollution affects children’s health and their ability to concentrate. Floods and cyclones disrupt attendance and damage school infrastructure. Water shortages are a recurring reality in many parts of the country, and waste management, plastic pollution, groundwater depletion and biodiversity loss are becoming questions of everyday survival rather than abstract concerns. Yet much of environmental education still treats the environment as something outside the classroom, and environmental protection as an occasional act of cleaning or conservation. The problem isn’t that Indian children don’t know about trees. It’s that they are rarely taught why environmental crises happen, who pays the price for them, and what other choices communities could make.
Why Environmental Literacy Matters
India has a long history of institutional efforts on environmental education. Supreme Court rulings in the 1990s pushed environmental education into schools, and the National Curriculum Framework, along with subsequent policy measures, tried to weave environmental topics into the curriculum. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 places considerable emphasis on environmental awareness, sustainable development and responsible citizenship. On paper, the direction looks promising. In the classroom, that intent rarely survives translation.
A student may be told to conserve electricity, but is anyone explaining where India’s electricity comes from, why coal still dominates the grid, how renewable energy is expanding, and what trade-offs come with each alternative?
A child might learn that forests matter for ecological balance, but is anyone teaching them why the trees are being cut, who owns the forest land, what happens to the communities living in or around forests, how infrastructure projects reshape ecosystems, or how climate change itself is accelerating deforestation? A student may be told to conserve electricity, but is anyone explaining where India’s electricity comes from, why coal still dominates the grid, how renewable energy is expanding, and what trade-offs come with each alternative? A pupil may be advised not to waste water, but do they understand groundwater depletion, unequal access to water, the weaknesses in urban infrastructure, or the politics of sharing rivers between states?
These are fundamentally different levels of learning. The first produces awareness. The second produces environmental literacy. India needs far more of the latter.
The Environment Is Not Only a Question of Individual Behaviour
One of the deepest weaknesses of conventional environmental education is its tendency to place almost the entire burden on the individual: turn off the lights, carry a cloth bag, don’t litter, plant a tree, use less water. These are worthwhile habits. But taken alone, they carry a quiet suggestion — that environmental destruction is essentially a matter of personal carelessness. Climate change, pollution and ecological collapse are not happening because people forget to switch off a fan or reuse a plastic bag.
They are the product of energy systems, industrial production, urban design, transport networks, agricultural practices, consumption patterns and public policy choices. When environmental education stops at individual behaviour, students may grow into conscientious consumers while remaining unaware of the institutional and political processes that actually shape environmental outcomes. They should also be taught to ask who is responsible for emissions, and why a project is sited where it is. That shift — from moral instruction to civic awareness — is the one Indian environmental education still largely has not made.
Climate Change Is Already in the Classroom
The strongest argument for rethinking environmental education is that climate change is no longer a distant subject for Indian schoolchildren — it is already shaping their school experience. Extreme heat makes classrooms uncomfortable and undermines concentration. Floods and cyclones damage school infrastructure and disrupt attendance. Air pollution curtails outdoor activity. Water scarcity affects sanitation facilities, with a disproportionate impact on adolescent girls.
These effects are not distributed evenly. A private school with air conditioning, backup power and a reliable water supply absorbs climate stress very differently from an under-resourced government school. Climate change, in other words, is not only an environmental issue — it is also a question of educational inequality. A child sitting through a heatwave in a poorly ventilated classroom experiences climate change in fundamentally different terms from a child in a climate-controlled one, yet few environmental education programmes address that disparity directly. They should. Climate literacy needs to teach children that environmental issues are inseparable from class, geography, gender, occupation and access to infrastructure.
From ‘Save the Planet’ to Environmental Justice
Another limitation lies in how environmental issues are framed. Students are told they must “save the planet.” But the planet will endure regardless. The more urgent question is what kind of civilisation humanity will be able to inhabit as environmental pressures mount — and that is where environmental justice comes in.
India’s renewable energy transition makes this complexity visible. Solar and wind power are essential to reducing dependence on fossil fuels, but large-scale projects can also mean land acquisition, damage to agricultural livelihoods, and conflict with local communities. Protecting biodiversity matters, but so do the rights of people living around protected areas. Electric vehicles cut tailpipe emissions, but their batteries depend on mineral mining with its own environmental and social costs. Recycling eases pressure on landfills, but informal waste collectors often work in hazardous, unregulated conditions.
None of this is an argument against environmental action. It is an argument for teaching students how environmental systems actually work, contradictions included. A mature curriculum should embrace that complexity rather than flatten it.
Teachers Need Support, Not Just Demands
None of this is possible if teachers are left to carry the burden alone. Environmental education, where it exists, is often exam-driven, squeezed for time, and layered on top of an already heavy workload. Many teachers have no specialised training in climate science or environmental policy. Improving environmental education is, in large part, a question of improving teacher preparation and giving teachers the tools to connect environmental issues to subjects they already teach: geography can examine groundwater depletion, economics can study the cost of pollution, civics can look at environmental regulation, mathematics can work with climate data, history can trace industrialisation and land-use change, and language classes can practise environmental journalism and writing. Environmental education does not need a separate subject. It needs a different way of teaching the subjects that already exist.
The Classroom as a Site of Inquiry
Some of the most valuable environmental learning may not come from lectures at all. Schools can double as sites of inquiry. Students can take temperature readings in their own classrooms and study local heat patterns, check air quality where they live, map household water use, conduct waste audits, track the loss of local biodiversity, or examine power consumption and the potential for renewables. They can trace where their school’s waste actually goes. These exercises build evidence-based reasoning in a way no poster campaign can, developing skills in observation, questioning and analysis that are essential to understanding environmental issues.
Beyond Symbolic Environmentalism
Finally, what is needed is a cultural shift, not another annual ritual. Environmental education should be more than a photograph of children clutching saplings. A planted tree is visible; the systems that actually determine environmental outcomes — urban design, energy generation, water governance, waste management, industrial regulation, the distribution of climate risk — are not, and children need to understand them regardless.
India is raising a generation that will have to navigate hotter cities, strained water systems, shifting coastlines and difficult development choices. Telling children to plant trees isn’t wrong. It simply isn’t enough. The goal of environmental education should not be young people who appreciate the value of a tree, but citizens who understand how societies shape the environment — and how the environment, in turn, shapes society. That is the real difference between symbolic awareness and meaningful education.
Society
India’s Young Dream Is Changing. Are We Ready?
From skills and employment to entrepreneurship, purpose and global aspirations, India’s youth are redefining what a successful future looks like.
India’s young generation is navigating a changing job market, skills gap, career pressures and global ambitions. What can India do to build a more secure and purposeful future for its youth?
India’s youth are shaping the destiny of the modern nation state, and the country’s demographic dividend is often cited as its greatest economic advantage. Yet in the post-pandemic era, that advantage sits uneasily alongside a labour market being reshaped by technology, and alongside growing anxieties about work-life balance. Degrees and formal qualifications matter less than they once did; skills now decide who gets hired. The conventional career ladder is giving way to entrepreneurship, and local ideas are finding global audiences through a digitally connected world.
India’s Youth Face a Changing Job Market
Even in the age of the internet, young people in India’s remote villages need more than connectivity to compete for jobs. Better English communication, soft skills training and technical know-how could do much to empower farmers and young people in rural areas. The Union government’s Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen Kaushalya Yojana, aimed at upskilling rural youth, is a step in this direction, but the scheme’s reach and impact deserve closer scrutiny than they currently receive.
Reducing unemployment cannot be the government’s job alone. It calls for a collective effort: a social reform movement that goes beyond electoral politics and pushes for constructive dialogue on the concerns of young people. Independent media has a role here too, in pursuing solutions-driven journalism, without fear or favour, that surfaces localised ideas for financial security and wellbeing.
Dignity of Work, Voice in Parliament
A social renaissance built on universal access to education and life-skills training, paired with a national minimum wage across sectors, would restore a basic sense of dignity to every working citizen. A national mission on youth concerns, one that cuts across party lines, is overdue. Greater youth representation in Parliament could combine the experience of older leaders with the energy of a younger population, in service of the Gandhian ideal of Sarvodaya, the upliftment of all through equal access to education, services and mentorship.
Life After the Civil Services Exam
Many young Indians aspire to the civil services, and a whole industry of coaching academies has grown around that aspiration. But only a small fraction of aspirants clear every stage of the examination and enter the service. For the rest, failure need not be an ending. Careers in media, academia and research are open to those willing to look beyond government employment. Aspirants would do well not to pour years into preparation alone; short courses and internships alongside exam preparation build a resume rich in the domains they actually care about, whatever path they eventually take.
Beyond the Rat Race
The pursuit of social prestige, at the expense of everything else, breeds burnout and a routine that feels mechanical rather than meaningful. A professional life worth having offers more than financial security; it offers peace of mind and a sense of contentment. That kind of self-reliance and purpose is possible, but it requires young people to define success on their own terms rather than borrow someone else’s definition of it.
The same is true of attention. Shrinking attention spans, a by-product of life on the smartphone, are a legitimate cause for concern in a hyper-connected era. A weekly or monthly digital holiday, however modest, can restore clarity of thought and make room for the kind of offline interaction that a screen cannot replace.
An Aspirational, Global Generation
India’s youth remain aspirational, drawn to opportunities in Europe, the Gulf and North America, and increasingly to frontiers beyond Earth. Geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine and a volatile global economy have not dimmed that ambition. Policymakers could do more to meet it at home, by building India into a genuine hub for higher education, with international students, faculty and university campuses. That transformation has already begun in pockets. What is missing is a coherent, pan-Indian policy to carry it forward, and with it, India’s aspiration to become a genuine centre of global learning.
EDUNEWS & VIEWS
Top States With Fake Universities in India: Delhi Tops UGC List, Students Urged to Verify Institutions
The University Grants Commission (UGC) has identified 32 fake universities operating across India, with Delhi accounting for the highest number. The Centre has directed states to initiate legal action and urged students to verify institutions before taking admission. As higher education expands and more students study across states, checking a university’s legal recognition has become essential to avoid academic, financial and career setbacks.
A degree is often seen as a gateway to employment, professional licensing, postgraduate education and, increasingly, opportunities abroad. Yet, in practice, employment is not always guaranteed even when students graduate from recognised institutions, reflecting the broader uncertainties of today’s job market. It is within this gap between expectation and outcome that fake universities often take hold, exploiting aspirations by offering quick or easily accessible degrees, even though the value of any qualification ultimately depends on whether the institution awarding it is legally recognised.
The issue has come back into focus after the Ministry of Education informed Parliament that the University Grants Commission (UGC) has identified 32 fake universities operating across India. In a written reply in the Rajya Sabha on August 5, Minister of State for Education Dr. Sukanta Majumdar said the UGC has asked states and Union Territories to initiate legal action against these institutions and prevent them from misleading students.
Delhi Tops the List of Fake Universities
The UGC’s latest list shows that fake universities remain concentrated in a handful of states. Delhi accounts for 12 of the country’s 32 fake universities, followed by Uttar Pradesh with four. Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Puducherry and West Bengal have two each, while Arunachal Pradesh, Haryana, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Rajasthan have one each.
Delhi’s position is significant because it is one of India’s largest destinations for higher education. Every year, thousands of students move to the capital to pursue university education. Students who relocate to unfamiliar places may find it difficult to distinguish recognised institutions from those operating illegally.
Kerala also features on the list with two institutions: St. John’s University, Kishanattam, and the International Islamic University of Prophetic Medicine (IIUPM), Kozhikode.
A Growing Higher Education System
India has one of the world’s largest higher education systems, and the National Education Policy 2020 aims to raise the Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education to 50 per cent by 2035. As access expands and more students move across states in search of better educational opportunities, verifying the legitimacy of institutions has become increasingly important.
Some fake universities exploit this demand by adopting names that resemble recognised institutions, claiming approvals they do not have or promoting courses through websites and social media. Students often discover the problem only when they apply for government jobs, professional registration, postgraduate admissions or universities abroad, where degrees from unrecognised institutions are not accepted.
Who Can Legally Award Degrees?
The UGC says only universities established through a Central Act, State Act or Provincial Act, institutions declared as deemed to be universities under Section 3 of the UGC Act, or institutions empowered by an Act of Parliament can award recognised degrees.
Any institution operating outside this legal framework, even if it uses the word “university” in its name, is not authorised to confer valid degrees.
How the UGC Is Responding
The Ministry told Parliament that the UGC has issued clarification letters, compliance notices, notices seeking explanations and warning notices to institutions identified as fake. It has also published public advisories and written to Chief Secretaries and Education Secretaries of the concerned states and Union Territories, asking them to register FIRs and begin legal proceedings.
The Centre has also requested state governments to identify any additional fake universities operating within their jurisdictions and take action against institutions that falsely claim university status.
What Students Should Do
The UGC has advised students and parents to verify an institution’s recognition before applying for admission. Applicants should check whether the university appears on the UGC’s official list of recognised institutions instead of relying only on advertisements or promotional material.
As more students move across states for higher education and seek opportunities abroad, the authenticity of a degree has become as important as the qualification itself. A few minutes spent verifying an institution on the UGC website can save years of academic, financial and professional loss.
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