The Dr K Kasturirangan-chaired committee recently submitted a Draft National Educational Policy (NEP) to the Ministry of Human Resource Development in May, 2019. It has been thirty-three years since the last comprehensive education policy of 1986. Naturally, this Draft Policy has been long awaited  and involves many complex issues (as evidenced by the controversy already created around the “imposition of Hindi”). This editorial seeks to examine only slices of the NEP that deal with higher education, and to foreground some on-the-ground challenges to meaningful implementation, especially more easily overlooked topics such as medical ethics.