How verification works on the National Academic Depository
NAD answers one question well. Knowing which question is the difference between relying on it and being caught out by it.
The National Academic Depository is the government's repository for academic awards. Institutions publish records into it, and those records surface to the student through DigiLocker. It works well for what it was built for, and the boundary is where most confusion starts.
What NAD actually confirms
When a record has been published to NAD by a recognised institution, what is being confirmed is that the institution itself lodged this award. That is a strong assurance: it comes from the issuer, not from a document somebody is holding.
That matters because it inverts the usual problem. Ordinarily a verifier examines a PDF and tries to work out whether it is genuine. With a depository record, the question becomes whether a matching record exists at source: which is a much better question.
Who can check, and how they get there
In practice, verification is usually student-mediated: the learner accesses their records and shares them. This is a deliberate privacy design, academic records are personal data and are not meant to be openly queryable by anyone with a name.
The practical consequence is worth stating plainly. A recruiter who has simply been emailed a PDF, with no contact with the candidate, cannot resolve it against the depository on their own. They need the student to participate.
What falls outside
NAD covers formal academic awards from recognised higher education institutions. Degrees, diplomas and marksheets. That scope is intentional and it is narrower than what an institution issues.
- Workshop, seminar and faculty development programme certificates
- Internship and training completion letters
- Bonafide, conduct and migration certificates
- Event, hackathon and competition awards
- Anything issued by a centre, cell or student body under the institution's name
All of those carry your seal. None of them are in the depository. Every verification request about them comes back to your office.
What this means if you are an institution
Publish your formal awards to NAD, because you are expected to and because it genuinely removes work. Then look honestly at the remainder. Count how many verification emails you answer in a month that are not about degrees or marksheets. That number is what the depository does not solve for you.
For that remainder, the same properties that make a depository record trustworthy can be applied to an ordinary document: a unique reference, a page a verifier can open without an account, and a signature over the record so an altered copy fails rather than passes.
What this means if you are an employer
Ask the candidate to share the record rather than accepting a PDF at face value. Where a document falls outside the depository's scope, look for a verification link on the document itself, and treat "email the institution to confirm" as the weakest option available, because the contact details on a forged document are chosen by whoever forged it.
Procedures and portal steps change. For current process, work from the official NAD and DigiLocker portals rather than a third-party guide, this one included.