Why the vacancies in senior faculty positions in Indian HEIs is a cause for concern

Faculty attrition is not a new problem nor is it unique to India. Universities everywhere struggle to retain teaching staff. Most existing commentary on the subject follows a familiar pattern: it lists reasons for departure, cites low salaries and heavy workloads, and calls for better pay and more respect for academics. These points are valid but they miss what is distinctive about the Indian case, which is vacancy rates rise with seniority.

A Parliamentary Standing Committee report on higher education tabled in Parliament in March 2025, recorded faculty vacancy data as of January 31, 2025 across IITs, NITs, IIMs, IISERs, and central universities. Of 18,940 sanctioned teaching posts in these institutions, 17.97% of assistant professor posts were vacant, 38.28% of associate professor posts were vacant, and 56.18% of professor posts were vacant. As a result, the vacancy rate more than triples between the entry rank and the senior-most rank.

Seen against global patterns, this is unusual. In the U.S. and the U.K., attrition is usually concentrated at the early-career stage, where job insecurity, tenure pressure, and low pay push people out before they are established. Once a scholar reaches a senior rank, retention improves.

In India, the reverse is true: the system retains junior faculty reasonably well and loses its most senior people at a much higher rate. This distinction matters because senior faculty perform functions that junior faculty cannot. They supervise doctoral students, lead research groups, sit on academic and administrative committees that shape institutional policy, and mentor early-career colleagues on how to build a research programme, secure funding, and navigate publishing. When a professorship remains vacant, these functions either do not happen, or happen poorly, through informal and overstretched arrangements.

The widening gap

Left unaddressed, the effect also compounds. Poorly supervised doctoral students become the next generation of faculty, trained to a lower standard than they would have been under adequate senior guidance. Weaker research leadership today reduces funded output tomorrow. This, in turn, makes vacant senior posts harder to fill later. This is what makes the seniority gap different from a routine staffing shortfall: it is not a static number that recruitment can close but one that reproduces itself forward through the people it was meant to train.

A second India-specific pattern compounds this problem: the growing use of contractual and ad hoc faculty positions to fill teaching gaps. Reporting based on Parliamentary Committee data shows that, even when institutions hire contract teachers to cover vacancies, fewer than 10% of these appointments are renewed into longer-term roles. This is not simply a symptom of faculty leaving. It reflects an institutional choice to staff positions with short-term appointments rather than build permanent academic careers. A person hired on a one-year contract has little incentive to invest in long-term research agendas, doctoral supervision, or institution-building, because their own position offers no such continuity.

Specific issue

Taken together, these two patterns point to a shortage not only of teachers but also of the specific senior capacity needed to train the next generation of academics. A shortage of assistant professors can be addressed through recruitment drives and salary revisions, since new Ph.D.s can be hired relatively quickly. A shortage of professors capable of supervising doctoral students and leading research programmes cannot be closed the same way, because that capacity takes years to build.

This is precisely where the usual policy response falls short. Raising salaries and reducing workload are necessary steps but neither directly closes the seniority gap. A junior faculty member retained for 10 years does not automatically become a professor capable of supervising doctoral students and leading research. That trajectory depends instead on structured career progression, protected research time at the senior level, and institutional investment in retaining people once they reach that stage, not only in recruiting them at the entry level.

In short, the Indian higher education system is not simply losing teachers. It is losing the layer of people responsible for training the next layer. Unless institutions treat this as a distinct and urgent problem, rather than folding it into the general conversation on faculty attrition, the gap will continue to widen with each recruitment cycle.

The writer is former professor and dean, Christ University, Bengaluru.