Voices Anand Neelakantan Sheila Kumar S Vaidhyasubramaniam Ravi Shankar Luke Coutinho Swami Sukhabodhananda THE new sunday express MAGAZINE Buffet People Wellness Books Food Art & Culture Entertainment june 28 2026 SUNDAY PAGES 12 Teaching No Lesson the Great Indian Education Crisis 1 million teacher positions were identified as vacant according to the NEP A 50% of private school teachers work without written contracts, according to a Tata Institute of Social Sciences study 15% of teaching posts in government schools continue to remain vacant, according to UDISE data By tanisha saxena t a government primary school in rural Bihar, a single teacher handles five classrooms. In one corner of one of the classrooms, seven-yearolds struggle to read simple sentences. Older children wait for help with mathematics. The teacher moves from group to group, attempting the impossible. By lunchtime, exhaustion has replaced enthusiasm. By the end of the year, many students will be promoted to the next grade despite never mastering the basics. In 2024, the Annual Status of Education Report that evaluates rural children’s schooling and learning levels states 76.6 per cent of Class III students could not read text across 19 languages at their grade level. Only 23.4 per cent of Class III government school students could read a Class II-level text. The teaching crisis in India is not one crisis. It is a cluster of simultaneous failures— in recruitment, in quality in pay in training, in retention, in curriculum, and , , now in the basic institutional ability to conduct a credible examination—that compound each other across decades and whose consequences are borne most directly by children in rural classrooms, by families mortgaging their futures to coaching institutes, and by a generation of teachers whose profession the state has hollowed out from every direction at once. 23 different non-teaching activities are routinely assigned to government school teachers On May 3, 2026—two years almost to the day after a similar scandal—over 2.27 million students sat for NEET again. Nine days later, the examination was cancelled. Investigating agencies found overlaps of up to 140 questions between the actual exam, and the answers circulating on WhatsApp and coaching centre networks in Sikar, Rajasthan, and elsewhere. The breach, according to investigators, was not a local incident. It exposed failure at the source of the examination system. The ‘Teacher Mafia’ behind the leak are in jail. It is little comfort for the parents of the 12 students who committed suicide because of the leak. This scandal points to the greater crisis that has infected India’s education system: The Great Teaching Crisis. The Geography of Failure Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, and Karnataka account for 91 per cent of the net national teacher deficit at the elementary level. Jharkhand has a student-teacher ratio of 47:1, less than double the NEP 2020 norm. According to the latest UDISE data, there are over two lakh vacant primary teacher posts and more than 14,000 schools where ratios exceed 40:1. Bihar’s secondary school dropout rate rose from 2.98 per cent to 9.3 per cent; UP’s rose from 0.52 to 3 per cent. Approximately 89 per cent of India’s 1,04,125 remaining single-teacher schools are in rural areas. In tribal and remote districts, entire clusters of schools have no permanent teacher for months. A parliamentary committee placed total SSA-funded school vacancies at 10 lakh, of which 7.5 lakh were at the elementary and primary levels. The teaching quality data is worse. Only 10 to 15 per cent of government school teachers, according to one reported survey, could score even 60 per cent marks in the subjects they teach. In mathematics, a mere two per cent scored above 70 per cent, against a national average of 46 per cent. ASER 2024 found 76.6 per << While public debates about education focus on board exams, curriculum revisions, and smart classrooms, the country’s deepest educational crisis is that there simply are not enough competent teachers cent of Class III students could not read text at their grade level across 19 languages. The World Bank Learning Poverty Index placed India at 70 per cent of 10-year-olds unable to read a basic text post-Covid, up from 55 per cent in 2019. Only 23.4 per cent of Class III government school students could read a Class II-level text. In a landmark World Bank study, 25 per cent of government primary school teachers were found absent during unannounced visits; only half of those present actually were teaching. Teacher absence rates ranged from 15 per cent in Maharashtra to 42 per cent in Jharkhand. An estimate places the annual salary cost of unauthorised teacher absence at $1.5 billion. Non-teaching duties exacerbate the problem: government school teachers are engaged in at least 23 different non-academic activities alongside classroom work such as election duty, Aadhaar verification, caste censuses, household surveys, mid-day meal monitoring, student data uploads. India’s Teacher Shortage Is Not About Numbers. It’s About Quality India’s teacher shortage is often framed as a numbers problem. But according to Manit Jain, former Chairman of FICCI ARISE, a prominent advocate of experiential and human-centered learning in K-12 education, and now Chief Visionary of the AI Literacy Mission (AILM), the more pressing crisis is how many active teachers are truly equipped to teach effectively India crossed one . crore school teachers mark for the first time in 2024-25, while the national pupil-teacher ratio improved to roughly 24:1. Yet estimates of teacher shortages still range from 2,50,000 to 1 million positions. “The harder question is not how many teachers we are missing,” Jain says. “It is how many of the ones we already have are truly trained and genuinely motivated.” An estimated 10 to 12 per cent of India’s 10 million teachers—roughly 1.2 million—lack the professional qualifications mandated for their level. Maharashtra’s D.Ed. programmes for primary teacher training were running at only 24 per cent seat utilisation in 2025-26, reflecting a collapse in demand: people don’t want to train to teach primary school because the profession pays `8,000 to `12,000 a `20,000 is the estimated median monthly salary of a private school teacher month in the private sector and requires years of examination queues for the government route. NEP’s Integrated Teacher Education Programme (ITEP), a four-year undergraduate degree that combines subject expertise with pedagogical training, is expected to be the minimum qualification for school teaching. The deadline is 2030, but fingers crossed: how 16,000 institutions, which are currently unable to adequately staff their own B.Ed. programmes, can meet the required scale is a question lacking a convincing answer. “India does not have a shortage of certified teachers,” Jain says. “It has a shortage of prepared ones.” What is a Teacher Actually Worth? In India, teaching does not have a level playing ground. At the top of the salary pyramid are Kendriya Vidyalayas and Navodaya Vidyalayas teachers, whose salaries are determined by the 7th Pay Commission: a Post Graduate Teacher’s monthly salary in hand is `80,000 to `85,000, with pension, housing allowance, medical benefits, and the lifetime security of a government job. Below them come state government school teachers: for example primary teachers in Delhi get `45,000-55,000 while in Bihar, newly appointed primary teachers get a basic pay of `25,000. But in the government sector, promotion structures are opaque and heavily seniority-weighted such as Karnataka’s new rules that mandate 12 years of service before primary school teachers become eligible for promotion. The private sector scenario is skewed: a teacher in a small-town private school makes between `8,000-12,000 per month. In mid-range urban private schools, they earn `20,000-30,000. It gets better city-wise: a senior teacher in a top Delhi private school is paid between `60,000-80,000, while a subject specialist at an elite international school in Mumbai or Bengaluru makes monthly over a whopping `1,20,000. But all jobs are not cushy. The median yearly salary of teachers in the private sector is about `2.4 lakh per year: 22 per cent below the national professional Turn to page 2