House panel flags vacancies in UGC, AICTE, says situation ‘critical’

A Parliament panel on Wednesday, March 18, 2026, flagged the “critical vacancy situation” in higher education regulators such as the University Grants Commission (UGC) and the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). The Union Ministry of Education plans to dismantle both the bodies under the proposed Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, 2025.

The Ministry’s Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports, chaired by Congress Rajya Sabha MP Digvijaya Singh, submitted its report on the Higher Education Ministry’s Grant Demands for the Financial Year 2026-27. He expressed concern over the lack of central data on the number of vacancies in central universities and warned the Ministry against increasing expenditure in the final months of the financial year.

Highlighting the situation in the UGC, he stated that “out of 763 approved non-teaching posts, 516 are vacant”, translating to a vacancy rate of 67.6%. “This severely impacts the UGC’s capacity to discharge its statutory functions, including monitoring thousands of universities, processing grant proposals and implementing NEP 2020,” he said.

“Only 20 posts have been filled on a regular/permanent basis in the last six years” in AICTE, it said, adding that 63.6% of sanctioned posts at middle and senior administrative levels are vacant, which “may hamper AICTE’s operations and the broader technical landscape as it regulates over 10,000 technical institutions.”

The Committee highlighted that India’s education expenditure from both the Center and States stands at 4.06% of GDP by 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 the ministry’s actual expenditure in the financial year 2024-25 fell short of the Budget Estimates by around INR 4,500 billion. The panel noted the “alarming 73.9% decline” in Capital Head (from ₹10.27 crore in BE 2025-26 to ₹2.68 crore in BE 2026-27) and recommended that the government prepare a five-year Capital Investment Plan with direct capital allocation from 2027-28.

The government introduced the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill last December, which proposes to encompass the functions of the UGC, AICTE and the National Council for Teacher Education in a new higher education regulatory structure. It will be chaired by a 12-member umbrella commission, and three separate regulation, standards and accreditation councils will operate under this commission. The Ministry justified this reform as necessary to reduce conflicts of interest and reduce the diversity of regulations and compliance of higher education institutions.

The bill faced objections from Opposition parties, claiming that it represented “excessive power of the executive”, subjected higher education institutions to “pervasive executive control, gradual autonomy, intrusive compliance requirements, heavy fines and closure powers” and was contrary to the principles of federalism. The Joint Parliamentary Committee, chaired by BJP MP D. Purandeshwari, is currently examining the bill.

Regarding central universities, the parliamentary panel said it was found that these institutes were using the resources allocated to them “efficiently and reasonably”. However, on faculty recruitment and vacancies, the committee noted that although more than 16,000 faculty posts and 11,000 non-faculty posts were filled between 2022-2025, “significant faculty vacancies continue in Centrally Funded Institutions (CFIs).”

He recommended that the government prepare “consolidated, annually updated vacancy registers of all CFIs” that could be used to track vacancies. The committee also noted that there was an issue of “significant increase in fees” in some Central universities, including Delhi University, and sought detailed justification for the same.

The committee welcomed the Prime Minister’s One Nation, One Subscription initiative, which it deemed a “landmark initiative” providing equitable access to more than 13,000 international academic journals for more than 6,500 higher education institutions, but also noted that the government did not have a financial plan in place for when the current three-year subscription expires in 2027. The committee recommended that the Ministry “enter into long-term agreements with broadcasters to secure predictable subscription costs”.