An Analysis of the Council of Architecture’s Interim Response to India’s National Education Policy 2020

The Indian government’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 visualizes a comprehensive transformation of the country's higher education, giving emphasis on multidisciplinary, flexibility entry and exits, and changes in regulatory regime. This research paper provides a critical analysis of the Council of Architecture (COA)’s Interim Report, “Architecture Education: Way Ahead,” which serves as a strategic response to the NEP from the perspective of architectural education and practice. The paper examines how the COA infers and adapts the NEP’s broad mandates to the precise, difficult demands of producing professional architects. It finds that the COA establishes a strategy of strategic orientation towards a proactive adaptation. The report has been worked on the core principles of multidisciplinary and flexibility in choices of curriculum but also ingeniously re-defines it to protect the integrity of architectural profession by robust licensure model centered on a professional degree equivalent to master’s level. The paper details the COA’s comprehensive framework for outcome-based education, its suggested curricular restructuring, and its faculty recruitment models. Ultimately, it concludes that the COA’s Interim Report is a sophisticated blueprint for navigating national educational reform while safeguarding professional standards, though it also highlights underlying tensions regarding regulatory independence and institutional scalability that remain unresolved.