Of the 20 IITs, nine reported staff vacancies exceeding 35%.
| Photo Credit: SUSHIL KUMAR VERMA
Over 15 lakh students appeared for the high-stakes Joint Entrance Examination this year to secure a seat in the country’s premier technical institutions. The competition has always been gruelling, particularly for the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), with roughly 80 students competing for every undergraduate seat in the 23 IITs.
However, data on vacant teaching positions in these institutes, obtained by The Hindu through the Right to Information (RTI) Act, raise questions on whether the students who surmount extraordinary challenges to get admitted receive the quality of education they deserve.
The Hindu’s request filed under the RTI Act to the Ministry of Education (MoE) in January, seeking details on vacancies in all Central Higher Education Institutions (CHEIs), was forwarded to individual institutions, of which only 79 of the 122 Centrally Funded Technical Institutes (CFTIs) responded. These included 20 IITs, 19 National Institutes of Technology (NITs),18 Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), 17 Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs), and five Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research.
A total of 7,132 of the 20,279 sanctioned faculty positions were vacant in these 79 institutions, which is 35.2%, or roughly one in every three posts. Sixteen institutions had more than 50% of their posts vacant, while another 14 had vacancies exceeding 40%.
Of the 20 IITs, nine reported vacancies exceeding 35%. The share of vacant posts exceeded 50% in IIT Kharagpur. The institute has a sanctioned strength of 1,600 teaching posts — the highest among the 20 IITs; 824 of these remained vacant. 35% of the 11,019 sanctioned posts in all 20 IITs were vacant.
A similar analysis for 19 of the 31 NITs that provided the data shows that four had vacancies exceeding 40%.
As per the data, 27.9% of 5,432 posts in these 19 NITs have not been filled. With over 129 of the 187 posts (68%) remaining vacant, NIT Andhra Pradesh accounted for the highest share of vacancies. More than 40% of the sanctioned posts were vacant in NIT Srinagar, NIT Sikkim and NIT Tiruchirapalli, which had the highest with 600 sanctioned posts.
According to a reply given in Parliament by the MoE last year, the sanctioning of faculty posts for NITs and IITs is a dynamic process, subject to periodic review in accordance with institutional requirements and a faculty-to-student ratio of 1:12 for NITs and 1:10 for IITs.
In 18 of the 21 IIMs that provided data, 32.3% of 1,741 sanctioned posts were vacant. Four IIMs reported vacancies exceeding 50% (Chart 4). IIM Mumbai had 59% of its posts vacant, with 77 of 130 vacancies unfilled.
IIITs reported the highest percentage of vacancies although their sanctioned posts were relatively low. A total of 665 (53.5%) of the 1,225 posts in 17 of the 25 IIITs that provided data were vacant. Vacancies exceeded 50% in eight of them.
In five of the seven IISERs that provided data, 276 of the 862 posts were lying vacant.
In another reply to the Lok Sabha earlier this year, the MoE, while not furnishing the number of vacancies, said that “occurrence of vacancies and filling thereof is a continuous process”. It further said that all CHEIs were exhorted to fill vacancies in September 2022 and later in October 2025 under a “Mission Mode” recruitment drive. It said that, as of January 24, 2026, a total of 17,878 faculty positions has been filled across all CHEIs under this “Mission Mode”.
Nivedha M. interned with The Hindu
Data for the charts were obtained through requests under the Right to Information Act. The responses were received between January and March, 2026
Published – June 10, 2026 07:42 am IST