Pakistan, Iraq, Sudan, Syria and Yemen ranked ahead of India
India’s academic freedom has fallen to its lowest level since 1900, ranking below Pakistan, Iraq, Sudan, Syria and Yemen and placing it among the bottom 10-20 pc globally.
Academic and research freedom in Indian universities and educational institutions has fallen to its lowest level since 1900, with India ranking among the bottom 10-20 pc of countries globally, according to the 2026 Academic Freedom Index.
India scored 0.14 on the Academic Freedom Index in 2025, down 0.269 points from 2015. The index places India among the bottom 10-20 pc of 179 countries and territories assessed, with its 2025 level lower than that recorded during the Emergency years of 1975-77.
Pakistan, Iraq, Sudan, Syria and Yemen ranked ahead of India. The Czech Republic topped the index, followed by Estonia, Belgium, Jamaica and Slovenia.
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The Academic Freedom Index is part of the V-Dem (Varieties of Democracies) project and is produced through a collaboration between researchers at Germany’s Friedrich-Alexander-Universitat Erlangen-Nurnberg, Sweden’s V-Dem Institute, the Scholars at Risk Network and the Global Public Policy Institute.
The project assessed academic freedom across countries from 1900 to 2025 using five measures: freedom to research and teach, institutional autonomy, academic exchange and dissemination, campus integrity, and academic and cultural expression.
India’s academic freedom has declined across the five parameters over the past decade.
In 2025, India scored 1.29 out of 4 in freedom to research and teach, down 1.144 points from 2015.
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The country scored 1.11 in academic exchange and dissemination, 1.12 in institutional autonomy, 1.00 in campus integrity and 1.01 in academic and cultural expression. All five scores were lower than their 2015 levels.
The data show a decline across the parameters from 2013-14. While freedom to research and teach was already at its lowest level between 1900 and 1950, the other four indicators reached their lowest recorded levels in 2025.
This means the decline is not limited to one aspect of university life. It covers research and teaching, institutional decision-making, the ability to exchange and disseminate academic work, the protection of campuses from outside interference, and academic and cultural expression.
The 2026 Academic Freedom Index uses publicly available data covering the period from 1900 to 2025. The project said the assessment contains more than one million coder-level data points.
The five indicators are combined into an overall index using a Bayesian Item Response Theory measurement model.
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The assessment also draws on the views of more than 2,357 country experts. The project said each country’s assessment is based on researchers from that country.
However, the core regional teams involved in the project do not include Indian scientists or academics.
The index defines academic freedom using components identified through a review of existing research and discussions with policymakers, academics and higher-education advocates.
The methodology is recalculated each year, using all available data and adjusting the calculation to maintain comparability across countries and years.
India’s decline is part of a wider global trend, although the number of countries recording a fall is considerably larger than those showing improvement.
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Between 2015 and 2025, academic freedom declined in about 50 countries, while only nine countries recorded an improvement.
China, North Korea, Afghanistan and Myanmar were among the countries that also recorded declines.
Academics raise concern
The findings have raised concerns among academics about the direction of higher education and research in India. They said a decline in academic freedom is not good for universities because research and teaching depend on the ability of academics to investigate subjects, question established views and exchange ideas.
Rahul Kapoor, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Social Work, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Gautam Buddha University, said the decline reflected multiple factors, including the weakening of academic autonomy and the reluctance within academia to defend academic freedom.
Rahul Kapoor
“When an important metric like the Academic Freedom Index declines over a sustained period of time, its cause cannot be linked to any one linear factor or policy. It is rather the result of multifaceted factors, the most important one being the willingness of academia to protect its academic freedom, which has been currently missing from Indian academic ethos,” Kapoor tells Media India Group.
He said the political change at the Centre in 2014 and the rollout of the National Education Policy in 2020 were viewed by parts of the academic community as opportunities to align with those in power, which, he said, contributed to compromises on academic independence. Kapoor also linked academic freedom with the wider information environment, pointing to the relationship between academic freedom and press freedom.
“Correlation with other important metrics like the Press Freedom Index is also important. In the absence of a free and just impartial press, academicians have not been able to find the right support to carry out their research without the fear of being vilified or harassed,” says Kapoor.
On the comparison with the Emergency period, Kapoor cautioned against treating the two periods as directly comparable.
“The comparison with the Emergency-era numbers cannot be a like-for-like comparison since the Emergency was one of the darkest periods of Indian democracy, where there was blanket and enforced censorship,” he says.
He says academics continue to conduct research and teaching despite the constraints, but institutional autonomy remains a key concern.
“Institutional autonomy is another important factor. The moment the larger academic community realises that their place of work lacks autonomy and is largely governed by the powers at the Centre or state levels, they tend to side with the forces in power, eventually compromising the overall academic freedom of the institution,” says Kapoor.
