Look - it's straightforward, is there a genuine contribution, is the thesis of sufficient quality to effectively communicate that - there's the standard. Who cares what random referees have / have not decided about the work if you are examining it?
Edit: I absolutely recommend the change suggested in the article. In contrast to many other programs, many Indian universities commonly do not support student travel costs for presenting research. A hard requirement for two conference papers means that poorly-paid Indian graduate students are either (A) limited to publishing in relatively-affordable but less prestigious local conferences, or (B) taking on significant personal expense to meet this requirement.
By lifting this requirement, students could publish exclusively in journals, for example, which do not have a presentation component. Allowing individual institutions to have more control over these requirements makes more sense, in my view.
For comparison, my US-based institution requires only a single publication (conference or journal) prior to graduation; this is meant to address the external validation problem mentioned above without discouraging students who want to work on extremely hard, extremely time-intensive projects that might produce fewer publications than "hot" topics could.
Having been a referee for a long time I can tell you that so much submissions are just minuscule variations on existing papers that are sugar-coated to be ohh so important contributions to the field that it is mind boggling. And if you decline it, they try the next journal with a lower impact factor until they get published.
The top glam journals have an additional layer of politics. It’s the worst system aside from all the others that have ever been tried...
(last time I was actually excited to review was for NEJM & was disappointed)
Not to mention, at the low rungs of Indian phds you would not even know if the thesis was just plain plagarized work from somewhere else. That is actually super common, even in publications.