A House panel took note of the situation in the UGC and said that “516 out of 763 sanctioned non-teaching posts are lying vacant”, representing a vacancy rate of 67.6%. | Photo credit: Sushil Kumar Verma
A House panel on Wednesday (March 18, 2026) termed a “critical vacancy situation” in higher education regulatory bodies such as the University Grants Commission (UGC) and the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). The Union Education Ministry plans to dismantle both the bodies under the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, 2025.
The Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports related to the ministry – headed by Congress Rajya Sabha MP Digvijaya Singh – submitted its report on the Ministry of Higher Education’s grant requirements for FY 2026-27. She expressed concern over the absence of centralized data on the number of vacancies in central universities and warned the ministry against increasing expenditure in the final months of the fiscal year.
Taking note of the situation in the UGC, it said that “516 out of 763 sanctioned non-teaching posts are vacant”, giving a vacancy rate of 67.6%. “This has a serious impact on the ability of the UGC to perform its statutory functions, including monitoring thousands of universities, processing grant proposals and implementing NEP 2020,” he said.
In AICTE, “only 20 posts have been regularly/permanently filled in the last six years”, adding that 63.6% of the sanctioned posts at middle and higher administrative level were vacant, which “may hamper the operation of AICTE and the wider technical environment as it regulates more than 10,000 technical institutions”.
The committee pointed out that India’s expenditure on education from both the Center and the states stood at 4.06% of GDP in 2022-23, falling short of the NEP 2020 target of 6% of GDP.
The committee called for a “robust quarterly expenditure monitoring mechanism” and noted that in the fiscal year 2024-25, the ministry’s actual expenditure fell short of the budget estimates by about ₹4,500 crore. The panel noted an “alarming 73.9% decline” in fixed capital (from ₹10.27 crore in BE 2025–26 to ₹2.68 crore in BE 2026–27) and recommended the government to prepare a five-year capital investment plan with direct capital allocation from 2027–28.
Last December, the government introduced the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, which proposes to incorporate the functions of the UGC, AICTE and the National Council for Teacher Education into a new regulatory structure for higher education. It will be headed by a 12-member umbrella commission, under which three separate regulatory, standards and accreditation boards will operate. The ministry justified the reform as necessary to limit conflicts of interest and reduce the amount of regulation and compliance for universities.
The bill was introduced to objections from opposition parties who argued that it represented “executive overreach”, subjected higher education institutions to “pervasive executive control, graded autonomy, intrusive compliance requirements, severe penalties and closure powers”, and was contrary to the principles of federalism. A joint committee of parliament headed by BJP MP D. Purandeshwari is currently examining the bill.
In the central universities, the House panel said that these institutes were found to have used the resources allocated to them “effectively and judiciously”. Regarding recruitment and faculty vacancies, the committee noted that despite over 16,000 faculty posts and over 11,000 non-faculty posts being filled in 2022-25, “significant faculty vacancies persist across all Centrally Funded Institutions (CFIs).
He recommended that the government prepare a “consolidated, annually updated vacancy register of all CFIs” that can be used to track vacancies. The committee also noted that there was an issue of “significant increase in fees” in some central universities, including the University of Delhi, and sought detailed justification for the same.
The committee welcomed the Prime Minister’s One Nation, One Subscription initiative as a “significant initiative” that provided equitable access to more than 13,000 international academic journals for more than 6,500 higher education institutions, but also noted that the government has no funding plan in place when the current three-year subscription ends in 2027.
Published – 18 March 2026 20:32 IST
