Rethinking Accreditation Standards in Indian Universities: A PRISMA-Guided Scoping Review, Comparative Evidence and an Integrity-Centred Reform Framework

Abstract

Background: India sustains one of the largest higher education systems in the world, yet the machinery meant to certify its quality reaches only a minority of institutions and has recently faced serious questions about credibility.

Objective: To re-examine accreditation standards for Indian universities by combining a scoping review, a comparative analysis of international quality-assurance architectures and a quantitative reading of official statistics.

Methods: A PRISMA-ScR-guided scoping review screened a 117-record institutional bibliography against a temporal boundary (publication in 2024 or earlier) and topical relevance, then added 48 purposively selected official, scholarly and press sources, giving 59 sources for narrative synthesis. Descriptive indicators were computed from published government data and compared with the European, American and Australian models.

Results: In parliamentary data from February 2023, 37.6% of universities and 20.7% of colleges held NAAC accreditation, leaving 695 universities and 34,734 colleges outside the system. Only about 11.1% of the institutions registered in the national survey had applied to the national ranking framework in 2024. Reaching the 50% gross enrolment target for 2035 requires a rise of about 1.66 percentage points a year, roughly 2.5 times the pace recorded between 2014-15 and 2021-22. The literature converges on five weaknesses: compliance-oriented evidence, impression management, vulnerable verification, uniform standards and weak follow-up.

Conclusions: The paper proposes the PROVE framework (Proportionate standards, Results-based evidence, Open process, Verified assessors, Enhancement support) under independent meta-accreditation, and advances six testable propositions for future research.