National Board of Accreditation (NBA), a body constituted by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) is responsible for the accreditation of Technical education programmes in India. NBA evaluates the performance of engineering programmes quantitatively by assessing 70 variables grouped under a set of 8 predefined criteria, and qualitatively by observing the strength & weaknesses of the programme. The qualitative analysis of NBA reports during the period 2000-2005 is utilized in this paper for exploring the status of undergraduate engineering education in India. This paper also assesses the performance in terms of the total scores obtained by the UG engineering programmes in the NBA accreditation process during this period.