House panel famous the situation on the UGC, saying that “516 out of 763 sanctioned non-teaching positions are vacant”, which amounted to a emptiness charge of 67.6%.
| Photo Credit: Sushil Kumar Verma
A House panel on Wednesday (March 18, 2026) flagged the “critical vacancy situation” at larger training regulators such because the University Grants Commission (UGC) and the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). The Union Education Ministry is planning to dismantle each the our bodies below its proposed Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, 2025.
The Department-related Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth, and Sports – headed by Congress Rajya Sabha MP Digvijaya Singh – tabled its report on the Department of Higher Education’s Demands for Grants for FY 2026-27. It expressed concern in regards to the absence of centralised knowledge on the variety of vacancies in Central universities and cautioned the Department towards racking up expenditure in the final months of the fiscal yr.
It famous the situation on the UGC, saying that “516 out of 763 sanctioned non-teaching positions are vacant”, which amounted to a emptiness charge of 67.6%. “This severely impacts UGC’s capacity to discharge its statutory functions, including monitoring thousands of universities, processing grant proposals, and implementing NEP 2020,” it stated.
In AICTE, “only 20 posts have been filled up on regular/ permanent basis in the last six years”, including that 63.6% of sanctioned posts in the center and senior administrative ranges have been vacant, which “may hamper the AICTE’s operations and the broader technical landscape as it regulates over 10,000 technical institutions”.
The committee highlighted that India’s expenditure on training from each the Centre and the States stood at 4.06% of the GDP as of 2022-23, falling wanting the NEP 2020 goal of 6% of the GDP.
The committee known as for a “robust quarterly expenditure monitoring mechanism”, noting that in FY 2024-25, the division’s precise expenditure fell wanting the Budget Estimates by about ₹4,500 crore. The panel famous the “alarming 73.9% fall” in the Capital Head (from ₹10.27 crore in BE 2025-26 to ₹2.68 crore in BE 2026-27), recommending that the federal government put together a five-year Capital Investment Plan with direct capital allocation from 2027-28 onwards.
The authorities has launched the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill final December proposing to subsume the features of the UGC, AICTE, and the National Council for Teacher Education in a brand new larger training regulatory construction. This will likely be headed by a 12-member umbrella fee, below which three separate regulatory, requirements, and accreditation councils will function. The Ministry has justified this reform as obligatory to scale back conflicts of curiosity and cut back the multiplicity of laws and compliance for larger training institutes.
The Bill was launched to objections from Opposition events, arguing that it represented “executive overreach”, subjected larger instructional institutes to “pervasive executive control, graded autonomy, intrusive compliance requirements, severe penalties, and closure powers”, and went towards the rules of federalism. A Joint Committee of Parliament, headed by BJP MP D. Purandeshwari, is at present analyzing the Bill.
On Central universities, the House panel stated that these institutes have been discovered to have “efficiently and judiciously” used the sources allotted to them. However, on college recruitments and vacancies, the committee famous that regardless of over 16,000 college posts and over 11,000 non-faculty posts being crammed from 2022-2025, “significant faculty vacancies persist across Centrally Funded Institutions (CFIs)”.
It really useful that the federal government put together a “consolidated, annually updated vacancy register of all CFIs” that can be utilized to trace vacancies. The committee additionally famous that there was a difficulty of “significant increase in fees” in some Central universities, together with the University of Delhi, and sought an in depth justification for this.
The committee welcomed the Prime Minister’s One Nation, One Subscription as a “landmark initiative”, which offered equitable entry to over 13,000 worldwide tutorial journals for over 6,500 larger training institutes, but in addition famous that the federal government didn’t have a monetary plan in place for when the present three-year subscription ends in 2027. It really useful that the Department “negotiate long-term agreements with publishers to safe predictable subscription prices.
Published – March 18, 2026 08:32 pm IST
