VIRTUAL EVENT: The Myth of Teacher Shortage in India

This event will examine the widespread perception in India that the country has an acute teacher shortage in public elementary schools, a view repeated in India’s National Education Policy 2020. 

Using official District Information System for Education (DISE) data, we argue that there is hardly any net teacher deficit in the country since there is roughly the same number of surplus teachers as the number of teacher vacancies.

We will show that measuring teacher requirements after removing the estimated fake students from enrolment data, there is a great reduction of the required number of teachers and an increase in the number of surplus teachers. We will also show that by removing fake enrolment and making a change to the teacher allocation rule to adjust for the phenomenon of emptying public schools, we get an estimated net teacher surplus.

We will highlight that if government does fresh recruitment to fill the supposed nearly one-million vacancies as promised in the National Education Policy 2020, the already modest national mean pupil teacher-ratio would fall at a permanent fiscal cost of nearly Rupees 480 billion (USD 6.6 billion) per year in 2017-18 prices - higher than the individual GDPs of 56 countries in that year.