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

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

The Department-related Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth, and Sports – headed by Congress Rajya Sabha MP Digvijaya Singh – tabled its report on the Department of Higher Education’s Demands for Grants for FY 2026-27. It expressed concern about the absence of centralised data on the number of vacancies in Central universities and cautioned the Department against racking up expenditure in the last months of the fiscal year.

It noted the situation at the UGC, saying that “516 out of 763 sanctioned non-teaching positions are vacant”, which amounted to a vacancy rate of 67.6%. “This severely impacts UGC’s capacity to discharge its statutory functions, including monitoring thousands of universities, processing grant proposals, and implementing NEP 2020,” it said.

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

The committee highlighted that India’s expenditure on education from both the Centre and the States stood at 4.06% of the GDP as of 2022-23, falling short of the NEP 2020 target of 6% of the GDP.

The committee called for a “robust quarterly expenditure monitoring mechanism”, noting that in FY 2024-25, the department’s actual expenditure fell short of the Budget Estimates by about ₹4,500 crore. The panel noted the “alarming 73.9% fall” in the Capital Head (from ₹10.27 crore in BE 2025-26 to ₹2.68 crore in BE 2026-27), recommending that the government prepare a five-year Capital Investment Plan with direct capital allocation from 2027-28 onwards.

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

The Bill was introduced to objections from Opposition parties, arguing that it represented “executive overreach”, subjected higher educational institutes to “pervasive executive control, graded autonomy, intrusive compliance requirements, severe penalties, and closure powers”, and went against the principles of federalism. A Joint Committee of Parliament, headed by BJP MP D. Purandeshwari, is currently examining the Bill.

On Central universities, the House panel said that these institutes were found to have “efficiently and judiciously” used the resources allocated to them. However, on faculty recruitments and vacancies, the committee noted that despite over 16,000 faculty posts and over 11,000 non-faculty posts being filled from 2022-2025, “significant faculty vacancies persist across Centrally Funded Institutions (CFIs)”.

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

The committee welcomed the Prime Minister’s One Nation, One Subscription as a “landmark initiative”, which provided equitable access to over 13,000 international academic journals for over 6,500 higher education institutes, but also noted that the government did not have a financial plan in place for when the current three-year subscription ends in 2027. It recommended that the Department “negotiate long-term agreements with publishers to secure predictable subscription costs.