The dismal performance of the government on generating employment has been visible on many fronts but in the case university teachers, the government simply failed to fill up even sanctioned vacancies in central universities, state universities and many other central institutions. Classes in various universities, colleges and higher institution are going on with full swing but with acute shortage of teachers. In certain cases a teachers is taking classes of over 100 students.

As per guidelines issued by UGC in June 2019 asking the government-run higher education institutions to fill up over three lakh vacancies within six months but nothing has been done so far. Prof Sidheshwar Pd Shukla of Delhi University said: “The government is not sensitive about education in the country. In the entire country, there are lots of vacancies. If I talk about Delhi University, around 7000 posts of teachers vacant on which 4500 people are working on ad hoc and rest of the people are working as guests. You can’t run higher education on adhocism and contractual basis. You need to have permanent faculty members for the smooth running of academic activities in the colleges and universities of the country.”

The ministry has been talking about filling up vacancies on war footing for many years but nothing has been done so far. The teacher and student ratio in India is 24:1 which is lower than Brazil and China where it is 19:1. If best practices are talked about, among the eight countries compared, India's student-ratio has turned out to be the lowest against Sweden 12:1, Britain 16:1, Russia 10:1 and Canada 9:1.

With every passing day, the shortage of teachers in higher educational institutions is worsening due to growing number of enrolment of the students and declining number of teachers. According to a survey, conducted by the HRD, All India Survey on Higher Education statistics, the number of student enrolment in higher education institutes have gone up from 3.23 crore in 2013-14 to 3.66 crore in 2017-18, the total number of teachers have declined from 13,67,535 to 12,84,755.

 As per a rough estimate, the country's higher education sector -- central, state and private universities - is facing a shortfall of over 5 lakh teachers across the country.