The Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, 2025 is a proposed Indian legislation (Bill No. 194 of 2025) introduced in the 18th Lok Sabha that seeks to establish a single apex institutional body called the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan (VBSA). The Bill was introduced on December 15, 2025, by Union Education Minister Shri Dharmendra Pradhan, with the goal of overhauling the higher education regulatory framework. It was created to solve the problem of a fragmented system with overlapping roles and inconsistent standards caused by the multiple existing statutory bodies.
The Bill operationalizes the vision of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and proposes to repeal the UGC Act 1956, the AICTE Act 1987, and the NCTE Act 1993. It replaces the three existing regulators—the University Grants Commission (UGC), the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), and the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE)—with the single VBSA. The VBSA will function through three separate councils: the Regulatory Council (Viniyaman Parishad) for licensing, the Accreditation Council (Gunvatta Parishad) for quality rating, and the Standards Council (Manak Parishad) for setting minimum academic standards.
Key provisions include granting graded autonomy to well-performing institutions and allowing foreign universities ranked in the global top 500 to open campuses in India. The Bill introduces graded penalties, with fines up to ₹75 lakhs for repeated contravention and at least ₹2 crore for establishing a university without prior approval. While it replaces the UGC, a key change is that the function of grant-disbursal is removed from the new regulator, unlike the UGC, and will be handled by the Ministry. The Bill is currently pending and was referred to a 31-member Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) for review on December 16, 2025. Institutions for medicine, law, and other professional courses remain exempted from the VBSA's purview.