In the last six years, the number of central universities in the country have more than doubled from 19 to 44, raising the hope of higher education reaching ever larger numbers of students. There is just one problem: there are not enough teachers to staff these institutions.Data from the Ministry of Human Resource Development reveals that many major universities in India severely lack teachers. The University Grants Commission, which oversees education in central institutions, estimates teaching vacancies in central universities at as high as 40%-60%.Predictably, this situation has forced the existing teachers to spread themselves thin, undermining the quality of education on offer. Perturbed by the downslide, the UGC recently decided to intervene.The commission’s chairman, Ved Prakash, wrote to vice chancellors of all central universities last month, demanding that the vacancies be filled before the beginning of the next academic year. He even threatened to withhold grants to those universities that fail to hire quality teachers.None of these anxieties is new. Minister of Human Resource Development Smriti Irani had said in July that more than 6,000 teaching positions – or about 37% of the total – were lying unfilled in 39 central universities, although the new academic session was a few months away.It is finally the students who these vacancies hurt. With each vacancy, the workload of the existing staff members increases, resetting their priorities. UGC data reveals that the student-faculty ratio, measuring the number of pupils to a teacher, has steadily worsened over the last three decades.According to a paper published this February in the IOSR Journal of Economics and Finance, universities have grown six-fold in India in the last four decades, but the overall faculty strength has risen by just four times.Referring to this issue, Prakash said last month that universities have been falling back on ad-hoc or temporary teaching staff whose commitment ends with delivering lectures. “The end result is that instructions are passed on to students in a ritualistic manner,” he was quoted as saying by The Times of India. “Universities should ensure that all the vacant positions in all subjects are filled without further delay in the interest of maintaining quality and standards.”The problem is set to get worse. Increasingly more students will be searching for admissions over the coming years as India’s much-touted demographic dividend comes of age.

India is expected to become the most populous country sometime in the next 15 years, by which time there will be an additional 90 lakh people in the 18-23 age group in search of college admissions. The government has a mammoth task just keeping pace with these figures, let alone raising teaching capacity to to fill vacancies and improve the faculty-student ratio.