NEW DELHI: State public universities (SPUs), which enroll 81% of India’s higher education students, are facing significant challenges, including severe faculty shortages and outdated infrastructure, which are undermining academic quality and research output.
A policy report released by Niti Aayog on Monday, titled Expanding Quality Higher Education Through SPUs, reveals that more than 40% of faculty positions in SPUs are vacant, and only 10% of these universities have well-equipped research facilities. These issues are severely impacting learning outcomes and research productivity.
Despite these setbacks, SPUs remain crucial to India’s higher education landscape, providing affordable and inclusive education to over 3.25 crore students. To address the challenges, the report recommends increasing public investment in higher education to 6% of GDP, implementing performance-based funding, and granting SPUs more autonomy to improve governance and research capacity.
SPUs, which form the backbone of India’s higher education system, continue to struggle with inadequate infrastructure and limited research facilities, hindering their ability to generate significant academic work. The report also highlights that access to digital resources is limited, with only 32% of SPUs having fully functional digital libraries, making it difficult for both students and faculty to access global research databases.
The report points out that the vacancy rate for faculty positions in SPUs is over 40%, leading to a student-teacher ratio of 30:1, much higher than the recommended 15:1. This shortage results in limited academic mentorship and research guidance for students, which impacts both learning outcomes and employability. “SPUs must prioritize faculty recruitment and retention strategies. Without adequate teaching staff, improving academic standards will remain a challenge,” the report states.
Although tuition fees at SPUs are, on average, 60% lower than those at private institutions, making higher education more accessible to students from socially and economically disadvantaged groups (SEDGs), the lack of resources and faculty continues to be a major hindrance.
To rejuvenate SPUs, the report proposes a multi-faceted reform strategy. It calls for increasing public investment in higher education to at least 6% of GDP, in line with the recommendations of the National Education Policy 2020. It also advocates for performance-based funding models to encourage research, greater autonomy for SPUs in decision-making, and stronger industry-academia linkages to improve graduate employability. Furthermore, initiatives such as the One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) scheme, which provides free access to over 13,000 global research journals, should be expanded to benefit all SPUs.
The report also notes that government colleges, especially those affiliated with SPUs, struggle with accreditation due to high NAAC costs, limiting their access to quality improvement funds. Bureaucratic inefficiencies further delay curriculum updates and faculty recruitment, undermining academic quality.
