India Is Creating One Accreditation Body to Replace NAAC and NBA

The Accreditation System Is About to Be Rebuilt

The Ministry of Education has set up a committee to form the National Accreditation Council (NAC) — a unified body that will eventually replace both NAAC and NBA. For leaders at higher education institutions, this is the most consequential structural change in accreditation since the UGC Act of 1956.

The committee is chaired by Bhushan Patwardhan, who currently heads the executive committees of both NAAC and NBA, and is charged with drawing up the organisational structure, quality parameters, and implementation roadmap for the new body. The NAC will function as one of four verticals inside the proposed Higher Education Commission of India (HECI), which is itself designed to replace the University Grants Commission and the All India Council for Technical Education.

Why the Merger Is Happening

India's current accreditation architecture is fragmented in ways that create real cost and inconsistency for institutions:

An institution running both general and technical programs must maintain parallel compliance frameworks — separate documentation, separate evidence formats, separate submission cycles — to bodies that do not share data with each other. NEP 2020 explicitly described this as inefficient and called for a "meta-accrediting body" to align the system around unified quality standards.

That body is the NAC.

The Four Pillars of HECI

Under the proposed Higher Education Commission of India, four verticals will govern all aspects of higher education:

The structural design concentrates regulatory, accreditation, funding, and standards functions into one commission while separating them into distinct verticals — intended to reduce overlap without creating new silos.

What Changes Under NAC

From Letter Grades to Verified Data

NAAC's current A++, A+, A, B++ grading system is already being replaced with a binary + graded model. Institutions must first cross a Minimum Benchmark of Good Level (MBGL) threshold, after which they climb through accreditation tiers. The direction of travel is clear: less peer-review-based qualitative scoring, more verifiable institutional data.

Under this model, what matters is not what you claim in a self-study report. What matters is what your data infrastructure can prove.

One Nation One Data

Running alongside the NAC formation process is the "One Nation One Data" initiative, which envisions a single academic data pipeline from institutions to all accreditation and ranking bodies. The goal: institutions submit data once to a central repository, which simultaneously feeds NAAC assessment, NBA accreditation, NIRF rankings, and UGC compliance cycles.

This means the data quality and auditability of your institutional records is about to determine accreditation outcomes in a far more direct way than it does today. Inconsistent or incomplete examination data will have nowhere to hide.

Technical and General Programs, One Framework

Under the current system, an engineering college preparing for both NAAC and NBA must maintain entirely separate evidence portfolios. NAC will create one framework with domain-specific criteria for technical programs embedded within the unified assessment. The administrative overhead of dual accreditation will disappear. The data integrity requirement will remain — and intensify.

Why Examination Records Are at the Centre of This

The shift to a data-driven accreditation model makes examination records the most auditable category of institutional evidence. Unlike self-reported statistics about placements or alumni outcomes, examination data is:

Under NAAC 2.0, Criterion 2 (Teaching-Learning and Evaluation) asks for evidence of assessment design, conduct, and outcome analysis. Criterion 5 (Student Support) requires result-related intervention data. Criterion 6 (Governance and Leadership) looks at the transparency and integrity of institutional processes.

Under NBA, Program Outcome (PO) attainment calculations depend on course-level marks data traced back to individual assessment events.

When NAC unifies these into one framework, the demands on examination records will only increase. An institution running digital evaluation — with evaluator logs, mark-entry timestamps, and full audit trails — will be well-positioned. An institution still processing answer sheets manually will struggle to produce the kind of machine-readable, manipulation-proof evidence the new system will require.

The Three-Year Evidence Window

Both NAAC and NBA assessment cycles require multi-year evidence — typically three to five years of institutional data. The NAC transition is not expected to compress this window. An institution that begins building verifiable digital examination records now will have a compliant evidence portfolio ready when NAC assessment cycles launch.

Institutions still operating paper-based evaluation face a structural problem: you cannot retroactively timestamp a manually checked answer sheet. The evidence window is running now, regardless of when the new framework formally launches.

What Institutions Should Do Now

The HECI Bill remains pending in Parliament and the NAC rollout timeline is not yet finalised. But the direction of Indian higher education governance is unambiguous. The accreditation system is moving from self-reported qualitative assessments to verified institutional data pipelines. The institutions that build the right examination infrastructure now will not need to scramble later.

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