The Post Nobody Filled

Pritiraj BrahmaFounding Partner, Pritiraj & Partners · 23 August 2026

As on 31 January 2025, 56.18 per cent of professor posts across India's central higher education institutions were vacant, on the Parliamentary Standing Committee's own figures. The shortage inverts the academic pyramid — worst at the top, worst again in reserved categories — and the ministry's position is that recruitment is not its responsibility.

ProvenancePublished 23 August 2026. Aggregate and grade-wise vacancy figures are as on 31 January 2025, from the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports report on the 2025-26 Demands for Grants of the Department of Higher Education, tabled 26 March 2025. Earlier figures are from Lok Sabha replies of 12 December 2022, 20 March 2023, 22 July 2024, 25 November 2024 and 12 March 2025. Where two official sources give different sanctioned strengths for the same body, both are stated. No institution-wise sanctioned-filled-vacant series has been published since.

As on 31 January 2025, 28.56 per cent of the 18,940 sanctioned teaching posts across India's central higher education institutions were vacant. The shortage inverts the academic pyramid: 17.97 per cent at assistant professor, 38.28 per cent at associate professor, and 56.18 per cent at professor. Those are the Parliamentary Standing Committee's figures, tabled in March 2025 — after two and a half years of what the government calls mission-mode recruitment. The ministry's formal position, given in the Lok Sabha, is that faculty appointment rests with each institution's board, with "no active role of the Ministry".

Every other constraint in Indian higher education is downstream of this one. Accreditation grades a teaching institution. Research output is produced by faculty. Employability is a claim about what a graduate was taught. A university with an empty chair is not a university with a temporary administrative problem; it is a university not delivering the thing it exists to deliver, to a cohort that will not get that year back.

Five findings anchor this analysis:

1. Roughly three in ten sanctioned teaching posts in central institutions are vacant, on the most recent figures Parliament has been given. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports, reporting on the 2025-26 Demands for Grants of the Department of Higher Education and tabled on 26 March 2025, recorded that as on 31 January 2025, 28.56 per cent of 18,940 sanctioned teaching posts across the IITs, NITs, IIMs, IISERs, central universities and other central higher education institutions were vacant. This is not a historical figure being pressed into service. It is the current published position.
2. The shortage is inverted — thinnest where seniority matters most. On the same report: 17.97 per cent of 11,298 assistant professor posts vacant, 38.28 per cent of 5,102 associate professor posts, and 56.18 per cent of professor posts. A system can absorb junior vacancy by loading teaching. It cannot absorb senior vacancy, because professors supervise doctoral students, chair selection committees, win and administer research funding, and hold departments to a standard. India's PhD enrolment is 1.8 lakh, 1.9 per cent of university enrolment; the grade that would supervise that cohort is the grade most often empty.
3. Two and a half years of mission-mode recruitment moved the base of the pyramid, not the top. Answering the Lok Sabha on 12 December 2022, the education minister put central university teaching vacancies at 6,180 of 18,956 sanctioned as on 1 December 2022 — 32.6 per cent — with professor posts at 1,529 vacant of 2,553 sanctioned, or 59.9 per cent. Twenty-six months and a declared recruitment drive later, professor vacancy stands at 56.18 per cent. The aggregate improved by about four percentage points; the professorate improved by under four. Whatever the drive achieved, it did not reach the senior grades, and no published document explains why.
4. Reserved posts carry a heavier and separately documented backlog. The March 2025 Committee report records, for central universities, 1,521 of 3,652 sanctioned OBC teaching posts vacant, 788 of 2,315 SC posts, and 472 of 1,154 ST posts — between 41 and 42 per cent in every category, against 28.56 per cent overall. A Lok Sabha reply of 25 November 2024 had put vacant reserved teaching posts at 2,750 across central universities. And a reply of 20 March 2023 recorded 549 reserved posts left unfilled over five years on the ground that no candidate was found suitable, across five central universities including Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Hyderabad. Whatever one concludes about any individual selection, a system that can decline to fill a reserved post 549 times without publishing the applicant count, the shortlist or the committee's reasoning has no mechanism by which that judgment can ever be tested.
5. Recruitment accelerated; responsibility for it was formally disclaimed. On 12 March 2025 the education minister told the Lok Sabha that 53,456 recruitments had been made across central universities, IITs and IIMs between May 2014 and December 2024, including 10,857 faculty positions filled between September 2022 and December 2024. Asked about de-reservation and category-wise vacancy, the minister replied that as autonomous institutions these bodies recruit under their own Acts, that recruitment powers vest with their Boards of Governors, and that "no active role of the Ministry is involved therein". The Committee, for its part, found institutions leaning on contractual teaching appointments and recommended a structured plan to phase out excessive contractual employment in favour of permanent faculty.

Autonomy is not the same as unaccountability

The ministry's position is legally correct and institutionally incomplete. Central universities and the IITs are autonomous; their statutes vest appointment in their own boards, and autonomy of that kind is worth defending. But autonomy over the decision is not immunity from the disclosure. The ministry funds these institutions, sanctions their posts, sets their reservation obligations through the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Teachers' Cadre) Act, 2019 — notified on 9 July 2019 — and monitors recruitment monthly by its own account. Nothing in autonomy prevents it from publishing, quarterly and institution-wise, sanctioned, filled and vacant counts by grade and category. What is being disclaimed is not the power to appoint. It is the duty to publish.

The same gap shows in the IITs. An August 2025 parliamentary reply stated that IIT faculty posts are sanctioned on a 1:10 faculty-to-student ratio; a later reply recorded over 3,500 vacancies filled since 2022 and around 460 visiting faculty in the system. Neither disclosed the actual ratio at any individual IIT, nor a consolidated institute-wise breakdown. The norm is public. Performance against the norm is not.

Two official sanctioned strengths for the same institutions

A smaller point, but it belongs in the record. The 12 December 2022 reply put IIM sanctioned teaching strength at 1,566 posts in one account of it and 1,556 in another, and gave central university sanctioned strength as 18,956 where the Committee's 2025 figure for a wider set of institutions is 18,940. These are small discrepancies and none of them changes an argument. They matter because a vacancy rate is a ratio, and a ratio whose denominator moves between documents cannot be tracked over time by anyone outside the ministry. Publishing one authoritative sanctioned-strength table, revised when sanctions change, would cost nothing and would make every subsequent figure checkable.

The part of the system we cannot see

AISHE 2021-22 records 15.98 lakh teachers against a total enrolment of 4.33 crore — approximately 27 students per teacher across the system, against the 1:10 the state applies to the institutions it considers its best. Central institutions are a small fraction of that system; vacancy data exists for them precisely because they are central. For state public universities, which carry around 31 per cent of university enrolment, and for the 45,473 colleges, no equivalent consolidated vacancy series is published at all. The part of the system we can measure is the part performing best.

The counter-case

Three arguments cut against reading vacancy as failure, and each has force.

First, a sanctioned post is a budget line, not a classroom. Sanctions rise when institutions expand, and a new IIT or central university sanctions its full complement on day one and fills it over a decade. Part of any vacancy percentage is arithmetic produced by growth, and growth is good. The Committee's figures cover a set of institutions that has expanded substantially since 2014.

Second, the recruitment effort is real and measurable: 10,857 faculty positions filled in twenty-eight months, and around 3,500 in the IITs since 2022. The assistant professor grade, at 17.97 per cent vacancy, is close to what a large system with continuous turnover would show even under good management. The base of the pyramid has substantially been fixed.

Third, filling a professorship badly is worse than leaving it open. An institution that appoints to clear a statistic has damaged itself for thirty years, and a selection committee that declines to appoint may be doing its job. Senior vacancy is also genuinely harder to fill: the eligible pool for a full professorship is small, internationally mobile and not expandable by recruitment drive.

The third argument is the strongest, and it points somewhere specific rather than excusing the position. If the professorate cannot be filled from the domestic pool, that is a supply problem with a name, and the state's response should be a published pipeline strategy — doctoral output, post-doctoral positions, a returnee channel — not a monthly monitoring mechanism for a vacancy that the monitoring has not closed. None of the three arguments, in any case, is an argument against disclosure.

What we would do

1. Publish a quarterly faculty return, institution-wise, in one fixed schema. Sanctioned, filled and vacant by grade and by category, for every central university, IIT, IIM, NIT and IISER, on a fixed date each quarter, machine-readable, against one authoritative sanctioned-strength table. This is a reporting instruction, not a statute, and it can be issued this year.
2. Treat the professorate as a separate problem with a separate plan. A 56 per cent vacancy at one grade and 18 per cent at another are not the same problem at different intensities; they have different causes and need different instruments. The Department of Higher Education should publish a senior-faculty strategy naming the eligible pool, the annual requirement and the sources it intends to draw on.
3. Make "none found suitable" a reportable event. Where a committee declines to fill a reserved post, publish the number shortlisted, the number interviewed and the stated ground — not the deliberations, not names, only counts and reason. Five hundred and forty-nine such decisions with no published record is not a defensible position for a public institution.
4. Cap and disclose contractual substitution. The Committee found institutions covering permanent shortfalls with contractual appointments. Publish, per institution, the share of teaching delivered by contractual and visiting faculty alongside the vacancy figure, and set a ceiling above which the board must explain itself. A vacancy rate read without this number understates the problem.
5. Put the vacancy position in the Vice-Chancellor's and Director's terms of appointment. Where boards hold the recruitment power, accountability must sit with the board. A performance agreement naming the vacancy position at entry and the target at exit costs nothing and places the duty where the authority already is.

India's higher education debate spends most of its energy on curriculum and regulation. Neither reaches a student except through a person standing in a room. More than half the professorships in the country's central institutions are empty, three years into a drive to fill them. That is the constraint — and unlike most constraints in this sector, the money for it has already been sanctioned.

Companion essay India's Demographic Clock — The Deadline Beneath Every Other Debate