Six years on from the National Education Policy 2020, Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) have a firm place on campus: cells, electives, faculty workshops, conferences.
Getting into the timetable was the easy part. The harder test is whether the subject is taught with the rigour demanded of any discipline: sources checked, methods explained, claims open to challenge.
The record suggests a pattern.
IKS works where it is anchored in a living scholarly tradition, with texts, practitioners and laboratories or patients to test claims against. It falters where it arrives as a compliance chore: thin material, teachers with a week's preparation, assessment by attendance.
A framework built on credits
The national framework has three layers. The policy set the goal: Indian knowledge, tribal and indigenous included, should enter syllabi "in an accurate and scientific manner". An IKS Division funds research centres and publications. The University Grants Commission (UGC) followed in June 2023, encouraging every student to take IKS credits worth five per cent or more of a degree, half or more of them tied to the major. As encouragement rather than obligation, the target leans on each university's own rules.
Research is the visible result.
An earlier Lok Sabha reply counted 32 IKS centres, plus 64 interdisciplinary projects. IIT Madras studies Indian mathematics, astronomy, Vastu and political thought; Nagaland University records tribal water practices.
Most colleges comply more simply. A lecturer sits through an orientation week, an IKS cell opens, and the first year gains a foundation course.
What a working tradition looks like
Jamia Hamdard in Delhi has taught Unani medicine at degree level for over three decades. It grew from a Unani clinic that opened in 1906 in Old Delhi and became a deemed university in 1989. Its Unani school offers the BUMS degree, MD and PhD under the National Commission for Indian System of Medicine, and a 100-bed accredited Unani hospital sits beside a 700-bed hospital practising modern medicine.
Four features matter. A statutory commission prescribes the syllabus, teacher qualifications and clinical hours, which lets outsiders inspect the standard. A ward is a sterner examiner than an essay: claims about treatment either hold up with patients or they do not. The founders wanted students reading Arabic and Persian sources, not summaries, so in 1980 Tibbi College shifted onto the Tughlakabad campus. And modern science is a short walk away: classical formulations can be tested through phytochemistry and clinical research, then dropped if the evidence fails.
Where the programme strains
Teachers are the first pressure point. Six days of orientation can teach a physics lecturer the terms of Ny? ya logic, but not how to read a medical manuscript in Persian or the ryabha?? ya. The Division itself says success depends on trained teachers and dependable course material, yet many colleges rely on staff with a single programme and compiled notes.
Content is the second. The UGC's model curriculum includes serious subjects such as metallurgy and astronomical instruments. But it carries themes that arrive as conclusions, like the "uniqueness of Indian culture". Teach from a conclusion and students are invited to agree; teach from evidence and they learn to judge. Mixed in one course, the two blur.
At IIT Mandi, a mandatory first-year course pairs theories of consciousness with the subtle body and reincarnation. A June 2026 conference hosted by its IKS centre, including a reincarnation session, drew an open letter from scientists and educators; the institute replied that this was one of some 50 sessions and that it tests ancient knowledge empirically. Inquiry is fair, but a required course speaks with the institution's authority, and setting reincarnation beside neuroscience implies equal evidential weight.
Assessment gets the least scrutiny. The five per cent rule tallies credits, not skills; many foundation courses are graded on attendance, a short task and a multiple-choice test, and little published data shows what students learn.
Breadth is another gap. What the Division backs tilts heavily towards Sanskrit, which deserves its place. Yet Unani, which arrived from the Greco-Arab world and grew here in Urdu, Persian and Arabic, is Indian knowledge too, as are Pali and Prakrit logic, Tamil Sangam ecology and tribal oral knowledge.
Building outward
IKS teaching should radiate from departments that already treat a tradition seriously: ones with command of its source languages, working practitioners and a means to test its claims. A Sanskrit department rich in manuscripts, a Unani school, a history-of-science unit: each could anchor courses for other disciplines. Colleges with none should use SWAYAM and NPTEL courses rather than have an unprepared lecturer improvise a syllabus.
A peer-reviewed bank of course outlines and reading lists, run jointly by the Division and the UGC and open to challenge by historians, scientists and text specialists, could show each unit's sources and keep documented achievement apart from interpretation. Teacher training should stretch from one week to a full semester, with reading in a source language. And the UGC should ask universities to publish elective enrolment, how many courses are tied to majors and student results.
The evidence behind all this is uneven. Nationwide learning data have not been released, and Hamdard is one atypical institution. Even so, it has kept a classical Indian discipline alive on a modern campus for three decades, answerable to a regulator, beside modern medicine, with its character and accountability intact. That should be the rule across IKS, not the exception.
The author is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi, and served as its Vice Chancellor; Views presented are personal.