India's higher education struggling with dwindling teacher headcount

Teacher strength declines for second straight year, pupil-teacher ratio deteriorates

The number of teachers in graduate and the post-graduate colleges and universities declined for a second consecutive year from 1.52 million in 2015-16 to 1.37 in 2017-18, government’s latest survey on higher education institutions shows.

The pupil-teacher ratio, or the number of students that a teacher takes care of, deteriorated from 20 to 25 in the same period. This comes at a time when the number of universities has steadily increased from 799 to 903.

Though the number of colleges has seen a reduction in the last two years, the report says that the decline is due to deletion of