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.
In three years, Central higher educational institutes filled 28,000 posts
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.
