The study, led by Bahati Shabani Nzeyimana and M. Sheela Mary of Bishop Heber College in Tiruchirappalli, with collaborators from Hyderabad and Brazil, set out to move beyond anecdotal claims that universities are ‘mainstreaming’ sustainability. Instead, the researchers built a framework of five key concepts, each mapped to clusters of the Sustainable Development Goals. Key Concept 1 covers environmental education. Key Concept 2 addresses health and well-being. Key Concept 3 captures an inclusive and equitable society. Key Concept 4 encompasses peace, justice and governance. Key Concept 5 deals with climate action and disaster management. By applying this lens to curricula across different categories of Indian higher education institutions, the team could quantify not just whether sustainability appears in teaching, but which dimensions of it thrive and which languish.

The methodological design is a hybrid. On the quantitative side, the bibliometric analysis mined Scopus-indexed publications from 2014 through 2025, tracing how research output related to the Sustainable Development Goals has evolved in India since the goals were adopted. This publication-level evidence provides a proxy for institutional attention and expertise. On the qualitative side, the five key concepts framework was used to systematically evaluate curricula across central universities, state universities, technical institutions and private universities. The mixed methods approach matters because documents alone can mislead: a university may publish extensively on climate science without ever requiring students outside that discipline to encounter it. Pairing publication trends with curriculum assessment gives a fuller picture of what students actually experience.

The headline finding is striking. Environmental education, Key Concept 1, is mandated by between 65 and 90 percent of the institutions examined, making it by far the most deeply embedded dimension of sustainability in Indian higher education. The researchers attribute this dominance largely to regulatory requirements, since statutory bodies overseeing Indian universities have progressively pushed environmental studies into compulsory coursework. In practical terms, millions of Indian undergraduates now encounter at least a core module on ecosystems, pollution, resource conservation or environmental law, regardless of their chosen degree. This is a genuine achievement, and one that distinguishes India from many countries where environmental literacy remains an elective afterthought.

But the picture darkens as the analysis moves beyond the environmental pillar. Key Concepts 3 and 4, covering inclusive and equitable society and peace, justice and governance, are present in curricula but only selectively integrated. Courses on social inclusion, gender equity, institutional transparency or access to justice tend to appear in specific programmes, such as social work, law or public administration, rather than as transversal requirements for all students. Key Concept 2, health and well-being, and Key Concept 5, climate action and disaster management, show similarly fragmented patterns. The study characterises the overall adoption as fragmented yet complementary: different categories of institutions contribute different pieces of the sustainability puzzle, but no single university type delivers the full spectrum, and students’ exposure depends heavily on where and what they study.

This fragmentation has consequences that extend well beyond academic taxonomy. The Sustainable Development Goals were designed as an indivisible agenda, in which progress on health reinforces progress on education, which in turn underpins climate resilience and equitable institutions. When a curriculum concentrates overwhelmingly on environmental content while treating health, inclusion and governance as optional specialisms, graduates may emerge with a deep but narrow understanding of sustainability. An engineer may master pollution control without ever studying disaster preparedness; a business student may learn corporate environmental reporting without encountering social equity frameworks. The Indian case suggests that regulatory mandates, while powerful, tend to pull a single dimension of sustainability into the mainstream rather than the whole agenda.

The bibliometric component adds temporal depth to this diagnosis. The 2014 to 2025 window captures the entire lifespan of the 2030 Agenda, allowing the researchers to observe how scholarly engagement with the goals has grown in India over more than a decade. The publication data reveal expanding research attention to sustainability themes across the higher education sector, yet the curriculum findings show that this research momentum has not translated uniformly into teaching. Publications cluster in disciplines already oriented toward environmental science, reinforcing the same imbalance seen in course requirements. In other words, the environmental dominance visible in curricula mirrors the disciplinary distribution of the research base itself, creating a feedback loop in which environmental topics attract more scholarship, which in turn justifies more environmental coursework.

To address these gaps, the study proposes a Sustainability Excellence Model built on the complementary strengths and weaknesses identified across institution types. The model emphasises collaborative pathways: central universities, state universities, technical institutes and private universities each hold distinctive capabilities, and the framework argues that systematic, transversal integration of the goals will require these institutions to share curricula, expertise and best practices rather than working in isolation. Transversal integration is the operative phrase. Rather than confining sustainability to a single compulsory environmental studies paper or to specialist degrees, the model envisions sustainability concepts threaded through engineering, commerce, humanities and health programmes alike, so that every graduate, whatever the discipline, encounters the full range of dimensions from environmental stewardship to social justice and climate resilience.

The findings arrive at a consequential moment for Indian higher education. With national policy reforms reshaping degree structures and an expanding emphasis on multidisciplinary learning, universities are actively revising curricula, creating a rare window of opportunity to embed the goals more comprehensively. The study’s framework offers policymakers and university leaders a practical diagnostic tool: by scoring curricula against the five key concepts, institutions can identify precisely which dimensions of sustainability their students never encounter. For a country that will graduate some of the largest cohorts of professionals in the world over the coming decades, the difference between a graduate who has studied only environmental science and one who has engaged with health equity, inclusive institutions and disaster governance could shape how effectively India delivers on its 2030 commitments.

What makes this research resonate beyond India is its methodological portability. The five key concepts framework distils seventeen sprawling goals into five teachable domains, offering education systems elsewhere a template for auditing their own curricula with comparable rigour. The study’s core insight, that regulatory mandates drive deep but narrow integration, is a warning for any jurisdiction relying on a single compulsory course to deliver sustainability education. Depth in one pillar is not breadth across the agenda. As the 2030 deadline approaches, the Indian experience documented in this study suggests that the next frontier of sustainability in higher education is not persuading universities to care, most already do, but persuading them to care about all of it, everywhere in the curriculum, for every student.

Subject of Research: Assessment of Sustainable Development Goal integration across Indian higher education curricula using a five key concepts framework

Article Title: Assessing sustainable development goal integration in Indian higher education curriculum using a five key concepts framework

Article References: Nzeyimana, B. S., Tiwari, S., Vedha, S. A., Santos, T. F., Santos, C. M., & Mary, M. S. (2026). Assessing sustainable development goal integration in Indian higher education curriculum using a five key concepts framework. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04779-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04779-1

Keywords: Sustainable Development Goals, higher education, curriculum integration, Indian universities, environmental education, sustainability education, bibliometric analysis, climate action, education policy, inclusive education, governance, health and well-being