Srinagar, Sept. 24 -- By Dr. Ashraf Zainabi

A campus produces wastewater, leaf litter and an energy bill, and it shelters a biodiversity of its own.

Students can treat the water, compost the leaves with worms, survey the wildlife and investigate the power the buildings consume, and a degree built around such work would look little like a list of lectures.

Design Your Own Degree, or DYoD, promises that degree.

I teach DYoD courses at IUST Awantipora, and I hold that within four years it should become the soul of NEP 2020. The claim is conscious and calculated.

The policy is in its sixth year, and its early years went to building structures, testing ideas and persuading institutions that change was possible. The next four have to move ...