For most Indian families, college is a promise. It’s the room into which parents send their children with the stubborn, almost sacred belief that they will come out changed, armed with a degree, a modicum of decency, a stock of aspirations, and even a job. That faith lives on today in the respectable garb of growth in official numbers. According to AISHE 2022–23 Provisional DateBetween 2014-15 and 2022-23, student enrollment increased from 3.42 crore to 4.46 crore. During the same period, the number of higher education institutions registered with AISHE increased from 51,534 to 60,380. But higher education is not an exercise in counting, and mathematics, however comfortable, has a habit of hiding rot. The university system is not tested at the admissions counter, where largesse is desired, but in the lecture hall, where this desire must be taught, corrected, and occasionally avoided. This is where the facade begins to crumble. India has expanded the classroom, but not always the teacher. And without a teacher, the classroom is not a place of change. It is just a room with benches, attendance registers and a hopeless future.
State universities bear the burden and bear the pressure.
The story of India’s higher education is often told through the IITs, IIMs, new private universities and the occasional well-photographed campus, but most students study in the quieter and far less glamorous part of the system. According to one Niti Aayog 2025 report cited. TNNState Public Universities (SPUs) enroll 81% of India’s higher education students and serve more than 3.25 crore students. These are universities and affiliated colleges that charge fees.Families can still try to organize and graduate students for whom private university is not an option but an exclusion.The same Niti Aayog survey TNN cited, there are severe tensions within the system.It said more than 40% of faculty posts in SPUs are lying vacant, reducing the student-teacher ratio to 30:1 against the recommended 15:1.
India’s SPUs are institutions where faculty, laboratories and academic support appear to be thinnest.
The report also states that only 10% of SPUs have well-equipped research facilities, while 32% have fully functional digital libraries. The numbers point to a difficult imbalance. The institutions that absorb most of India’s college-going population are also the ones where faculty, laboratories, and academic support appear thinnest, meaning that access has expanded far faster than the academic capacity needed to sustain it.
Central universities also show the same fault line.
Faculty disparities cannot be dismissed as a problem for state universities alone, an expected consequence of overburdened provincial systems and the slow pace of local accreditation. It also runs through central universities: institutions that are expected to have a different weight in the academic imagination, better funded, more visible, more competitive, and often treated as benchmarks for the wider system. According to the 364th report of the Department of Higher Education on demands for grants for 2025-26 PRS According to the analysis, 29 percent teaching posts in central universities were lying vacant by December 2024. As against 18,940 sanctioned teaching posts, 13,530 were filled while 5,410 remained vacant.
Faculty diversity also exists in central universities in India.
The deepest weakness is at the senior end. Central universities had 2,540 approved professorships, but only 1,113 were filled. 1,427, or 56%, were vacant. At the associate professor level, 1,953 out of 5,102 posts were vacant, a rate of 38 per cent. Assistant professor positions were better staffed, but not full: 2,030 of the approved 11,298, or 18%, remained vacant.Such senior vacancies do not simply mean redistributing a few more classes among the available teachers, although that does happen. They mean fewer PhD scholars under constant supervision, fewer departments with seniority to confidently revise courses, and fewer people within the institution who have the experience to sit on selection committees, academic councils, boards of studies and the less visible institutions where universities are actually built.
Seats are also vacant in marquee campus.
The above PRS analysis makes it difficult to reduce quarantine as only a state or central university issue. For institutions of national importance such as the IITs, IIITs, NITs, IIMs and IISERs, the numbers are quite uncomfortable as these are the institutions that India expects to do more than run degree programmes. They aim to be part of the faculty pipeline for engineers, managers, researchers, doctoral scholars, startup founders and, eventually, the rest of the system. Well, the space is not too small. As of March 2023, IITs had 4,415 vacancies against 11,292 sanctioned faculty posts, a vacancy rate of 39%. IIITs had 705 vacancies against 1,315 sanctioned posts, or 54%. NITs had 2,206 vacancies against 7,483 sanctioned posts, a difference of 29%, while IIMs had 484 vacancies, or 31%, against 1,570 sanctioned posts. IISERs were the exception, with 52 vacancies against 735 sanctioned posts, or 7%.
Vacancies in IITs and IIMs are a real cause for concern.
These institutes aim to better resource Indian higher education, places where departments must have the depth to offer challenging electives, supervise doctoral work, build research groups and train the next generation of academics. When they lack faculty, the damage shows up slowly, in narrow academic choices, delayed research, thin mentoring, weak faculty pipelines and departments that learn, almost politely, to expect less of themselves. Extending seats is the easy task of statecraft, but building the faculty to justify those seats is slower, less photogenic, and much less amenable to deadlines.
Why is there a shortage of teachers in the system?
The faculty shortage, then, is not a neat administrative pain waiting to be rectified by another recruitment calendar. Rather, it is the point at which many of the silent failures of the Indian university system converge, rather oddly, in a single classroom. Of course some of it is ordinary butter. Teachers retire, resign, die, are promoted, move to new institutions, or are reassigned to expanding departments, while new seats and new programs create new demands before old vacancies are filled. The Ministry of Education has said the same in Parliament, noting that vacancies arise due to promotion, retirement, resignation, death, opening of new institutions and additional requirements arising from higher strength and capacity of students. Centrally funded higher education institutions have also undertaken mission-mode recruitment from September 2022, with 28,450 vacancies to be filled by July 2025, including 16,507 faculty posts, according to PRS’s Academic Analysis 2026-27.This number deserves recognition, but not the unthinking kind of praise. It indicates that the system is running but it does not indicate that the system has recovered. After all, with expanding enrollment, institutionalizing, increasing seating and then with the theatrical innocence of a man who invited 200 guests to dinner and forgot the kitchen, there is something vaguely funny about this country that even teachers should be appointed. Mission-mode recruiting can reduce the visible backlog, but if vacancies continue to arise as a normal byproduct of major architectural expansion, these drives become a recurring civic ritual like the academic equivalent of painting wet walls before an inspection party arrives.The deeper problem is structural, and the NITI Aayog report on state public universities says so, although official documents are expected in more ornate language. Its recommendations — finalizing recruitment rules, simplifying the recruitment process, prioritizing full-time faculty and increasing the proportion of full-time teachers in SPUs — read a rather harsh indictment when read without bureaucratic prose. They mean that shortages are not just about the absence of qualified people. It is also about the tedious machinery through which an approved post must travel before becoming a teacher in the classroom. Meanwhile, students sit in crowded rooms and are told that the promise of a truly higher education must await procedural facilitation.At the state level, the problem is often even more acute. Hiring freezes before the recruitment process begins, prospects are suspended, guest and contract teachers are used as permanent alibi, full-time posts are delayed by long approval chains, reservation-roster complexity and the familiar theater of institutional caution. In addition, many public universities offer working conditions that test endurance more than attract ambition. Strong candidates, naturally, read the terms of the deal. Private universities hire faster, industry pays better, overseas research placements offer a cleaner system. However, an academic career in many government institutions requires immense patience and the salary is respectable but not magnetic. So the question is not why the vacancies exist. Every major system has vacancies. The critical question is why they become habitual, why transitory reforms become entrenched in governance styles, and why a country so fluent in the rhetoric of the demographic dividend is so reluctant to invest in the people who are expected to turn that dividend into ideas, skills, and confidence. India has widened the door to higher education, which is no small feat. But the door is not education. Without full-time faculty, enough time to teach well, security, and institutional respect, the promise of college begins to fade. The way out is neither mysterious nor glamorous, which is why it is being postponed. It begins when faculty recruitment ceases to resemble a crisis-time festival and becomes the norm for institutional care. Sanctioned posts have to move with enrolment, new courses and expansion of seats, sorry not to arrive after classrooms are already overcrowded. State approval, often, turns appointments through files into hajj, where a vacancy created in June is still looking for salvation in January. The real reforms are boring, and therefore almost radical: funded posts, faster approvals, regular selection cycles, full-time faculty for core teaching, and a research structure that makes academia feel like a career, not an endurance test.
