Flexible degrees are generous to students and brutal to manual record systems — a learner who exits with a diploma, banks credits, and re-enters years later is exactly the case spreadsheets cannot hold.
Multiple entry and exit is one of the most genuinely student-centred ideas in NEP-era reform. Leave after one year with a certificate, two with a diploma, three with a degree — and return within seven years to pick up where you left off, credits preserved in the Academic Bank of Credits. For a country where students leave education for financial reasons far more than academic ones, it is humane and overdue. It is also an administrative problem Indian institutions have never solved at scale.
The difficulty is in "preserved." A credit valid and redeemable for seven years must be locatable, verifiable, and honourable long after the student left day-to-day systems. Easy when records are structured and linked to a persistent identity. Close to impossible when they live in departmental spreadsheets never built to be queried half a decade later. Consider the registrar: record an exit, bank credits, issue the qualification; years later retrieve the record, validate the credits, map them against a revised curriculum, re-admit. Each step is where manual systems lose information.
From a generous policy to a working system, from credits declared to credits durably held, from "students can return" to "the institution can actually take them back, record intact."