Holistic Learning Revisited: NEP 2020, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, and the Employability Orientation of Commerce and Management Undergraduates in Goa

Abstract

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 does not present itself as an act of modernisation borrowed from elsewhere. It presents itself as a return to India's own intellectual inheritance, invoking the multidisciplinary, experientially grounded learning traditions historically associated with centres such as Takshashila and Nalanda. This paper examines how that self-framing intersects with a contemporary institutional concern: the perceived employability of undergraduate students. Drawing on a survey of 612 final-year Bachelor of Commerce (B.Com) and Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) students across government, government-aided, and private colleges in Goa, all studying under the NEP 2020 curriculum and possessing internship exposure, the paper presents a descriptive profile of respondents' demographic and institutional distribution, internship duration, and career intentions, and reads these patterns against NEP 2020's own account of holistic, skill-integrated education. The discussion is situated within the Ministry of Education's 2023 guidelines mandating credit-bearing Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) courses in undergraduate curricula, which operationalise, in institutional terms, the same revivalist logic underlying NEP 2020's employability provisions. The paper works at a conceptual and descriptive level rather than testing a structural model, and argues that NEP 2020's employability provisions function as a present-day institutional expression of an older Indian pedagogical premise: that learning and practical readiness for the world were never meant to be separated. It closes by considering what this framing implies for how Indian higher education institutions discuss, and design for, graduate employability.