At a government primary school in rural Bihar, a single teacher handles five classrooms. In one corner of one of the classrooms, seven-year-olds 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.
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 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.
The harder question is not how many teachers we are missing. It is how many of the ones we already have are truly trained and genuinely motivated.Manit Jain, Chief Visionary of the AI Literacy Mission (AILM)
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 Rs 8,000 to Rs 12,000 a 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 Rs 80,000 to Rs 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 Rs 45,000-55,000 while in Bihar, newly appointed primary teachers get a basic pay of Rs 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 Rs 8,000-12,000 per month. In mid-range urban private schools, they earn Rs 20,000-30,000. It gets better city-wise: a senior teacher in a top Delhi private school is paid between Rs 60,000-80,000, while a subject specialist at an elite international school in Mumbai or Bengaluru makes monthly over a whopping R1,20,000. But all jobs are not cushy. The median yearly salary of teachers in the private sector is about Rs 2.4 lakh per year: 22 per cent below the national professional average. In a 2023 TISS Mumbai report, half of all private school teachers work without a written contract. Those on long contracts get only about 60 per cent of average government teacher salary. In 2025, approximately 94 per cent of teachers across sectors are paying for basic supplies like books and stationery out of their own pocket to keep their jobs. “Low pay discourages experienced educators from staying in teaching,” says Tapasya Singh, a primary school teacher in Delhi, “Schools are frequently forced to hire less experienced candidates or cope with recurring vacancies.” These disparate pay structures create a labour market that offers unattractive options for capable teachers.
Low pay discourages experienced educators from staying in teaching. Schools are frequently forced to hire less experienced candidates or cope with recurring vacancies.Tapasya Singh, a primary school teacher in Delhi
The Training Pipeline and Its Leaks
India’s yearly teaching needs can be met with approximately three lakh new teachers, even as 19.5 lakh B.Ed. and D.Ed. graduate across more than 16,000 NCTE-recognised institutions. The culprit is the B.Ed. college ecosystem. Approximately 92 per cent of India’s 16,000 teacher education institutions are privately managed, and not subject to direct government quality control. The NCTE—responsible for maintaining standards across all of them—has a vacancy of 54 to 89 per cent. The District Institutes of Education and Training (DIETs), which is the public backbone of in-service training, has 30 to 50 per cent faculty vacancies. The system is attempting to train teachers without trainers, through institutions it does not regulate. Private B.Ed. colleges in Tier III towns are purely commercial enterprises. They will admit students with weak academic backgrounds at the right price, for minimal pedagogical training. The logic is straightforward: parents associate English medium with better outcomes and therefore will pay Rs 500-1,500 for monthly tuition, even in places where the government school is free. In every Tier II and Tier III city, hoardings of institutes that advertise “fluency in 30 days” at Rs 2,000-5,000 per student per month are many. No qualification is required to run these; the teacher may be a local commerce graduate with a functional accent and enough YouTube expertise to pass for competent. Madhu Verma, a parent from Delhi, says, “My daughter, who is in Class V at a government school, tells me that the teacher simply translates the textbook into Hindi during English classes instead of actually teaching the language.” English is the dominant language of formal employment, higher education, and upward mobility in India. ASER documents most Class VIII government school students cannot read a simple English sentence. The spoken English institute is the market created by such a failure. Says Verma, “English is such an important skill today that I have enrolled my daughter for private English classes after school. I don’t want her to face the same challenges I did growing up, when English was not taught properly in my school, which limited my opportunities later in life.” Owners of low-grade private schools hire the cheapest available teacher like a local graduate in their 20s, who are kept on an annual contract of Rs 8,000-10,000 per month, sans job security or career progress. A student in such a school is taught by someone who learned to teach at a college barely qualified to teach, in subjects the teacher has not mastered; the “medium” is English only by name.
The English coaching and spoken English institute sector operates outside regulations. Dr Atul Srivastava, Co-Convenor United Front & President, Association of Private Schools, Uttar Pradesh, shares, “Governments often end up regulating others while exempting themselves from similar scrutiny. Private schools, meanwhile, face layer upon layer of compliance requirements.” The NEP proposed the creation of an independent regulator, the State School Standards Authority (SSSA). He says, “Today, however, many regulations are based on infrastructure requirements that may not reflect local realities. For example, schools may be required to meet specifications such as road-width norms that are simply not feasible in many towns and villages. The real question should be whether a school is providing quality education, employing competent teachers, and serving children effectively.”
In rural areas especially, access to education is often more important than whether a road outside the school meets a particular technical standard. Good teachers, safe learning environments, and student outcomes should carry greater weight. “Across sectors, India has independent regulators. Without one for education, school leaders spend more time dealing with paperwork and regulatory requirements than focusing on educational quality, innovation, research or experiential learning,” Dr Srivastava explains.
The proliferation of budget private schools, particularly in semi-urban and rural areas, has produced a sector structurally incapable of delivering quality while commercially incentivised to appear as though it does. The school spends minimally on infrastructure, exploits the RTE-mandated 25 per cent EWS reservation for government reimbursements, and occasionally collects parallel fees from EWS families despite the statute. A 2014 national survey found fewer than 10 per cent of private schools fully complied with RTE provisions. Enforcement is so inconsistent as to be functionally absent in most states: an NGO filing 200 complaints against non-compliant Rajasthan schools in 2019 saw penalties against just 15 of them. Maharashtra’s failure to act on an 85-school contempt directive from the Bombay High Court resulted in a fresh contempt petition in 2025.
The Ideological Disruption
From 2022 onwards, political disruptions in syllabus have compounded the pedagogical damage to learning. NCERT made 1,334 changes across 182 books, officially described as “rationalisation”. What followed went considerably further: chapters on Mughal courts and the Delhi Sultanate were removed. The Harappan Civilisation was relabelled the “Sindhu-Sarasvati Civilisation” in some references. Political science textbooks updated the Indo-China war to reflect official government positions. New textbooks, introduced class by class between 2023 and 2026 under the NCF-SE 2023 framework, carry such revised historical narratives. Such ideological revisions create a crisis of instruction for teachers, especially history teachers who developed lesson plans around their studies over the years. Now they are required to teach a substantially different version of events without receiving fresh training or reliable prior access to new materials. To compound matters, physical textbooks have not yet arrived in schools when sessions began. Delhi school principals publicly noted “a huge learning gap” in students who missed such content while sitting for competitive examinations. Since only 10 to 15 per cent score 60 per cent in their own subjects, fresh instruction to teach a revised curriculum is functionally indistinguishable from the instruction to teach what they do not know. The gap gets improvised, or it gets left.
Where are all the Teachers Going?
The teaching profession has increasingly become vulnerable to international competition. Countries such as the UK and the UAE have emerged as attractive destinations for Indian teachers, offering significantly higher salaries and better working conditions. In the UAE, mid-range international schools often pay several times the median salary earned by private-school teachers in India. In 2025, the Commonwealth Teachers Group noted that teachers from 48 countries are eligible to apply for Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) in England. Over three-quarters of applications awarded between February 2023 and March 2024 to Indian teachers were from Commonwealth nations. The financial logic is not ambiguous. A secondary school teacher in the UAE earns $2,000-5,500 per month in tax-free income; many get housing, health insurance, and an annual flight home. A qualified STEM teacher at a mid-range UAE international school earns $3,500-4,500 per month tax-free. They can save $2,000 or more per month according to living index calculations. That exceeds the annual salary of most private school teachers in India.
According to ISC Research, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and China account for 60 per cent of new positions. Ten new schools opened in Dubai alone during 2024-25, generating 800 to 1,000 new teaching jobs in just one year. These schools specifically recruit English-competent teachers with CBSE and ICSE curriculum experience: a significant portion of India’s secondary teaching workforce. Visas for teachers are being expedited in Western countries. Australia needed 2,600 more teachers by December 2025; 83 per cent of its schools are short of teachers. The UK met only 62 per cent of its secondary initial teacher training recruitment target in 2024-25 while Germany has 40,000 teaching job vacancies.
The world’s major economies are in active competition for the qualified teaching pool India has produced and priced out of its own classrooms. India’s larger educational brain drain is mostly the reason. For every one student coming to India from abroad, 28 Indians fly out for higher education. In 2024, 13.36 lakh Indians were recorded studying abroad. Outward remittances for education purposes rose over 2,000 per cent between 2013-14 and 2023-24, reaching Rs 29,000 crore that equaled 53 per cent of India’s entire Union higher education budget for that year. When teachers follow students out the door, the loss is more than just financial. A country that cannot retain its trained teachers is a country that is outsourcing its intellectual future. Vibhuti Taneja, Founder, EdCel Consulting, says the decline in the quality of education in India is not primarily a consequence of curriculum design, technology, or infrastructure shortcomings. “Every education reform ultimately succeeds or fails in the classroom, and the classroom is only as effective as the teacher leading it,” she says.
My daughter, who is in Class V at a government school, tells me that the teacher simply translates the textbook into Hindi during English classes instead of actually teaching the language.Madhu Verma, a parent from Delhi
The Uphill Task of NGOs as Teaching goes Downhill
The institutional failures have attracted a serious NGO ecosystem. Pratham’s Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) methodology, which assesses children’s actual learning rather than grade placement and teaching accordingly, has been adopted by governments across Africa and South Asia. Pratham reaches millions of children across 23 states in India. Teach For India places qualified graduates as two-year fellows in under-resourced schools; eVidyaloka connects volunteer teachers with remote villages via digital classrooms with over 20,000 children in 200 villages; the Learning Links Foundation’s Sambal Shiksha programme supplements government teaching with foundational literacy camps. Smile Foundation installs solar-powered digital kits and smart classrooms in rural schools. Bal Raksha Bharat has impacted over 10 million children through teacher training and remedial support. Room to Read focuses on library development and girls’ literacy while Educate Girls works community by community in Rajasthan to maintain the enrolment of girls in schools, a serious problem in many states.
These are serious, evidence-based organisations performing triage on a broken system. Pratham’s TaRL targets government school students who lag behind grade-level expectations in non-functioning schools. eVidyaloka’s classrooms substitute absent or non-existent teachers in rural areas. Every effective NGO intervention reflects state failure. The scale mismatch is permanent: 14.71 lakh schools, 24.8 crore students, 10 million teachers required while the best NGOs collectively reach tens of millions of schools. While they are able to model solutions and fill specific gaps, they cannot be a substitute for a functioning state.
India has invested heavily in school infrastructure, digital initiatives, curriculum reform, and expanded access to education. These are important achievements. But classrooms do not teach children; teachers do. A smart board cannot replace a skilled educator who sparks curiosity. A revised textbook cannot compensate for a teacher who lacks training or support. An examination reform cannot solve learning deficits created years earlier. “If current trends continue, we risk creating schools that are technologically equipped but lack inspired educators. We may produce students who perform reasonably well in examinations yet struggle with creativity, confidence, emotional intelligence, and workplace readiness,” Jain says.
The NEET paper was leaked by teachers. The teacher recruitment exam was run by criminal networks that placed fake candidates in classrooms. It is also the logical outcome of a system in which teaching is simultaneously a gate to public sector employment and a profession the state has made structurally unattractive. The examination can be bought, where the classroom it leads to has no teachers, and where the most qualified graduate looking at a teaching career sees better money in Dubai and a better road out.