New Delhi, Sept. 8 -- The Supreme Court's intervention against the appointment or continuation of teachers who lack statutory qualifications raises a question much larger than the controversy over Assam's provincialisation policy: who is teaching India's children, and how seriously does the country treat the quality of those entrusted with its classrooms? The Court has directed that teachers cannot be appointed or absorbed without qualifications prescribed under the Right to Education, NCTE and UGC frameworks. The immediate dispute concerns schemes through which teachers of certain institutions can enter government service, but the underlying principle should apply far beyond one state. Teaching cannot become a profession in which eligibility standards are relaxed whenever governments encounter an administrative or political inconvenience. India rightly demands qualifications from doctors, engineers and lawyers because incompetence carries consequences. An inadequately prepared teacher may cause damage that is less visible but far more enduring, affecting hundreds of children over an entire career. Governments cannot proclaim ambitious learning targets while treating the competence of those delivering education as negotiable.
Yet qualification alone will not solve India's classroom crisis. The deeper problem is the contradiction between insisting on standards and failing to provide enough properly trained teachers where they are needed. UDISE+ 2025-26 data show more than 1,00,000 single-teacher schools across the country. A recent survey across ten states also found acute shortages in core subjects, particularly mathematics and science, while revealing troubling mismatches between subjects taught and teachers' academic backgrounds. These are not merely staffing statistics. A school with classrooms, textbooks, digital boards and midday meals but without enough competent teachers remains educationally deficient. Vacancies persist because recruitment is frequently delayed, deployment is irrational, remote postings are difficult to fill and hiring becomes entangled in litigation or political calculation. Governments then reach for temporary arrangements, contractual appointments or retrospective regularisation. What begins as an emergency response gradually becomes a parallel recruitment system. The eventual victims are qualified candidates waiting for transparent selection and, more importantly, children who have no choice over who enters their classroom.
India therefore needs to stop treating teacher recruitment as a periodic vacancy-filling exercise and begin viewing it as the foundation of educational policy. States should maintain transparent, continuously updated vacancy databases, conduct recruitment on predictable calendars and map teachers according to subjects and enrolment rather than political geography. Teacher-training institutions require equally rigorous scrutiny; a degree is meaningless if the institution awarding it provides poor training. The Supreme Court recently reinforced the NCTE's authority to demand annual performance reports from teacher-education institutions, an important reminder that quality control must begin before a teacher reaches a school. Regular professional development, classroom mentoring and credible assessment must follow recruitment. Most importantly, governments must resist the temptation to use regularisation and absorption as substitutes for open competition. Compassion towards long-serving employees may have a place in public policy, but it cannot override minimum competence or fairness to qualified applicants. India often speaks of its demographic dividend, knowledge economy and global ambitions. All three ultimately begin in a classroom. There can be few more consequential public appointments than deciding who stands at its front.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.