NEP's Holistic Progress Card Is Here — Does Your Institution Have the Digital Infrastructure to Support It?

A Different Kind of Record

In February 2026, a software company launched a platform specifically designed to help schools implement PARAKH's Holistic Progress Card under NEP 2020. In Himachal Pradesh, the state board of school education rolled out a digital 360-degree student assessment pilot across select schools. At the university level, institutions affiliating schools are beginning to ask how Holistic Progress Card data will interface with degree admission processes.

These are early signals of a structural shift in how India conceptualizes student assessment — and what that shift demands from educational institutions at every level.

What the Holistic Progress Card Actually Requires

The Holistic Progress Card (HPC), developed by PARAKH (Performance Assessment, Review, and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development) under NCERT, represents the most significant change to Indian student assessment since the introduction of Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) over a decade ago.

Where CCE focused primarily on academic subjects with limited co-curricular components, the HPC mandates a genuinely multi-dimensional record covering:

The HPC is currently mandated for the foundational stage (Classes 1-2), preparatory stage (Classes 3-5), and middle stage (Classes 6-8). The framework for secondary and higher secondary stages is in active development, and universities are expected to eventually receive students whose complete school record includes HPC data alongside, or in lieu of, traditional mark sheets.

Why This Is a Digital Infrastructure Problem

The HPC is not a report card that can be completed at year end. It requires continuous observation, structured recording, and data aggregation across an entire academic year for every student in every class.

A college with 2,000 students and 80 faculty members cannot maintain HPC-compatible records using paper forms or unstructured spreadsheets. The volume of data — multiple competencies, multiple observations per competency, multiple assessment cycles — demands a structured digital system capable of:

This is why the launch of HPC-specific software platforms in early 2026 is significant. It signals that the market has recognized the digital infrastructure requirement that genuine HPC compliance creates.

The College and University Implication

Degree colleges and universities might view the HPC as a school-level concern. It is not — for two reasons.

First, affiliated schools: Most colleges in India are affiliated to universities that also affiliate schools. As HPC implementation scales from pilot to mandatory, universities will need to develop systems for receiving, validating, and using HPC data in admission processes. That infrastructure question for universities is not hypothetical — it is a question of timeline.

Second, the underlying assessment philosophy: The HPC reflects NEP 2020's mandate that assessment should be continuous, competency-based, and multi-dimensional rather than terminal and marks-only. UGC's minimum standards for continuous internal assessment at the undergraduate level, issued in 2025, reflect the same philosophy applied to degree programmes.

Colleges that have already digitized their internal evaluation — assignment submissions, term test marks, project assessments, practical evaluations — have a head start. They already operate with the data collection and documentation habits that HPC-scale compliance requires.

NAAC and the Assessment Data Requirement

NAAC's revised binary accreditation framework, implemented from 2025, requires institutions to submit verifiable evidence for every claimed indicator across seven criteria. Criterion 2 (Teaching-Learning and Evaluation) is where assessment practices receive the most direct scrutiny.

Under the DVV (Data Validation and Verification) process, NAAC assessors cross-check institutional claims against student performance records, internal assessment documentation, examination results data, and learning outcome attainment records.

Institutions with digital evaluation systems generate this evidence systematically. Institutions relying on paper registers must compile evidence retrospectively, often from incomplete or inconsistent records.

The HPC introduces a new layer of evidence that NAAC assessors are likely to increasingly expect: not just final marks, but structured documentation of the process by which those marks were arrived at.

Criterion 2 sub-indicators directly relevant to digital assessment

Institutions with robust digital evaluation infrastructure can demonstrate compliance with all four sub-indicators through system-generated reports. Institutions without it must reconstruct evidence from fragmented sources — a process that is both time-consuming and produces records of lower credibility with DVV teams.

The NBA Parallel

For engineering colleges, the NBA's Outcome-Based Education (OBE) framework has required structured course outcome (CO) and programme outcome (PO) attainment data for over a decade. NBA accreditation requires institutions to demonstrate not just that students were assessed, but that assessment data was used to calculate CO and PO attainment and feed into curriculum review cycles.

Colleges that have built digital systems to collect and aggregate assessment data for NBA compliance are already operating with infrastructure logic that is directly compatible with HPC requirements. The question is whether that logic extends to all assessment types — not just formal examinations, but continuous assessments, project evaluations, and practical components.

Mapping HPC requirements to existing accreditation frameworks

The overlap is substantial. Institutions already maintaining digital evaluation systems for NAAC or NBA compliance are doing the same work that HPC compliance will eventually require — they simply need to extend it to additional assessment dimensions.

What Institutions Should Be Doing Now

The HPC rollout is moving from pilot to mainstream over the next 18-24 months. Universities will need to develop HPC-aware admission frameworks. Colleges will face audit processes that reference assessment quality, not just quantity. Three practical steps for institutions:

1. Digitize all internal assessment records now: Move assignment marks, term test scores, attendance data, and project evaluations out of paper registers and into structured digital systems. This is the foundation on which all other compliance layers rest. Institutions that delay this step will face a harder transition later, when compliance is mandatory rather than aspirational.

2. Begin mapping assessments to stated learning outcomes: The HPC and NAAC Criterion 2 both require that assessment tasks be linked to defined competencies or outcomes. This mapping does not need to be perfect from the start, but the habit of specifying what each assessment is measuring — and recording the results accordingly — must be established before accreditation cycles demand it.

3. Build contemporaneous documentation habits: Both the HPC framework and NAAC's DVV process require evidence collected in real time, not reconstructed retrospectively. Digital evaluation systems that timestamp every entry create this contemporaneous record automatically. Institutions that implement such systems gain audit-ready documentation as a byproduct of normal operations.

The Institutional Readiness Gap

India has approximately 42,000 colleges affiliated to universities across the country. Only a fraction have fully digitized their evaluation infrastructure. The combination of HPC scaling, NAAC's binary accreditation framework, and UGC's continuous assessment requirements is creating conditions where digital evaluation infrastructure transitions from a differentiator for forward-looking institutions to a baseline requirement for all institutions.

The HP Board's digital HPC pilot, the emergence of HPC-specific software platforms, and the growing adoption of digital evaluation among autonomous colleges are parts of the same systemic shift.

The institutions that will navigate this shift most effectively are those that begin building digital evaluation infrastructure before compliance becomes mandatory — when there is still time to learn, iterate, and embed good practices into institutional culture rather than bolt them on under accreditation pressure.

The HPC is not a distant mandate. The schools that will send students to Indian colleges in the next five years are being assessed under it now. The colleges that receive those students need to be ready to work with the data they bring.

Related Reading