New Delhi: Academic and research freedom in Indian educational institutes and universities is at its lowest since 1900, even below the Emergency years between 1975 and 1977, an international ranking has highlighted.
India ranked among the bottom 10-20 per cent of countries globally in academic freedom, according to the V-Dem (Varieties of Democracies) Academic Freedom Index project—a collaboration between researchers at Germany’s Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Sweden’s V-Dem Institute, the Scholars at Risk Network, and the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi). The project assessed academic freedom across the world between 1900 and 2025.
The countries that outperformed India included Pakistan, Iraq, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. The Czech Republic topped the index, followed by Estonia, Belgium, Jamaica and Slovenia.
The index evaluated countries on five parameters—freedom to research and teach, institutional autonomy, academic exchange and dissemination, campus integrity, and academic and cultural expression.
The data show that Indian institutes have seen a progressive decline in all of the parameters since 2013-14. Except for freedom to research and teach, which was at its lowest between 1900 and 1950, India recorded its lowest-ever scores in every other area in 2025.
Academics have expressed concern over India’s slipping ranking.
“As a scientist and mentor, I find this concerning because questioning, independent research, and the freedom to disagree are essential to science and national progress,” said Roxy Mathew Koll, a senior climate scientist at Pune’s Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM).
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How academic freedom was measured
The evaluation used publicly available data from 1900 to 2025 and includes more than a million coder-level data points, five indicators and an index on academic freedom based on a Bayesian IRT (item response theory) measurement model.
The model is customised and inputs sought from over 2,357 country experts around the world. While the Academic Freedom Index project said each country’s assessment is based on researchers from that country, it is important to note that the core regional teams do not include any Indian scientists or academics.
“The index defines a range of components ‘often considered essential to the de facto realisation of academic freedom based on a review of the literature and in-depth discussions with policymakers, academics and advocates in the higher education field,’” the 2026 report read.
The document explained that each year, a new calculation takes all available data into account and optimises comparability across years and countries.
India’s position
The ranking places India in the bottom 10-20 per cent of 179 countries and territories worldwide on academic freedom.
A detailed analysis showed that India scored 0.14 overall in 2025, on a scale of 0 to 1. This was 0.269 points lower than in 2015. In freedom to research and teach, India scored 1.29 (on a scale of 0 to 4), down 1.144 points from 2015. The score was 1.11 for academic exchange and dissemination, 1.12 for institutional autonomy, 1 for campus integrity and 1.01 for academic and cultural expression. All these scores were lower than in 2015.
The latest report said that between 2015 and 2025, academic freedom declined in about 50 countries. Only nine countries saw an improvement. The nations that performed worse include China, North Korea, Afghanistan, and Myanmar, among others.
Binay Panda, professor at the School of Biotechnology at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), said that while China had less academic freedom, it has climbed much higher than India in scientific productivity.
“Despite having less academic freedom, China has climbed much higher in scientific productivity than India. The real question for us is, are we ready for lower academic freedom in exchange for massive infusion of public funding into science?” he said in a post on X.