The education system in India has been recognized as the third best among all other education systems all over the world. In spite of this, Indian education system faces a lot of obstructions. It went through many reforms and changes still all the problems could not be solved. Recent investigations found that there has been a huge scarcity among the faculties of colleges and universities. Therefore, this irregular ratio of students and teachers has marked a major problem in many central universities of India.
Most of the universities of India have observed that at least two seats among five seats are vacant. Faculty scarcity has truly marked a serious problem according to the Human Resources Ministry. Universities say that students have been facing a serious problem in their education. This issue has also been questioned in the Rajya Sabha, Shyamal Chakraborty who is an MP was questioned about the faculty scarcity problem. He answered that there are overall 16,542 seats for faculties in the Indian universities but out of them almost 6152 seats are still left empty. This was from the reports taken by the March end.
Central universities which are the victims of this scarcity are all the IITs and IIMs and also includes some of the renowned universities of India like the Tata Institute of Social Sciences of Bombay, the Indian Institute Of Science in Bangalore etc. each of these universities are funded by the central government directly. Shortage of teaching staffs has seriously caused a major effect.
The president of India, who is the chancellor of all the 40 central universities, himself, is disappointed to have such a bad issue regarding teaching staffs. Day by day, education in India has reported to have a decrease in its progress, learning system is losing all the charm and energy. Universities, colleges and other educational institutions have been remarked as the victims.
One of the reasons behind the faculty shortage is that low pay scale for the teachers. Private sectors provide a better pay than the central government appointed teachers. Low pay scales distract the teaching staffs to shift to the private sectors. Thus, the students prefer to shift their aim towards other profession other than teaching to get a better life. Later, when this issue became serious, HRD ministry took the responsibility to take measures against this.
HRD Ministry said that it took certain steps to make the teaching job very attractive. The retirement age of the central government employed teachers were being increased to 65 years. Universities under the direct control of central university were given permission to appoint guest lecturers and temporary staffs.
Pay packages were being increased. Pay packages were modified than made more attractive than any other pay packages offered by private sectors. In fact, a number of research fellowships both junior and senior were increased to 38000 which were before 28000. Stipends were increased by 50%. Improvement was also made by including research presentation in central universities and international conferences.