New Delhi: India's higher education system is facing a widening gap between student enrolment and the availability of teaching staff, according to a recent working paper by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM). Titled How India is Transforming Educational Capacity under the New Education Policy 2020: School Networks, Higher Education and Pathways to Work, the paper highlights that while millions of students have entered colleges and universities over the past decade, the teaching workforce has grown at a much slower pace.
Between the 2014-15 and 2023-24 academic years, student enrolment in higher education increased by 31.5 percent, climbing from 3.42 crore to 4.50 crore. Over the same period, the number of teachers grew by just 17.6 percent, moving from 14.73 lakh to 17.32 lakh. Consequently, the overall student-teacher ratio worsened from 23:1 to 26:1, meaning there were three more students per teacher in 2023-24 than there were a decade prior.
The staffing crunch is not restricted to smaller or resource-strapped colleges, as India's premier technical and management institutions are also affected. Data cited in the paper from a parliamentary standing committee report as of March 2023 indicates that nearly 39 percent of sanctioned faculty positions at the Indian Institutes of Technology were vacant. Similarly, the Indian Institutes of Management reported that nearly one in three teaching posts remained unfilled.
Other prominent institutions face comparable deficits. The National Institutes of Technology reported a 29 percent vacancy rate, while the Indian Institutes of Information Technology recorded 54 percent vacant posts. In contrast, the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research maintained a much lower vacancy rate of 7 percent.
Authored by EAC-PM member Soumya Kanti Ghosh and economist Shashidharan Sharma, the paper emphasizes that expanding higher education requires more than physical infrastructure, campuses, and additional seats. It depends heavily on teacher availability and academic support systems. While acknowledging that these figures represent a snapshot from March 2023 and that enrollment and teacher metrics involve different reporting methods, the authors argue that the slower growth in instructional staff points to persistent capacity pressures.
The central argument of the report is that expanding institutional access without strengthening teaching capacity could undermine educational quality. A growing student population requires adequate faculty to handle instruction, research guidance, and academic support. Ultimately, the paper suggests that future educational growth must balance physical expansion with a rigorous assessment of human resources and faculty availability.