Ayush Kumar Upadhyay, Aug 12, 2026
If you ask any young teacher in India about how they got their job, you will hear three letters in the middle of the story: TET. The Teacher Eligibility Test determines whether a person is eligible to enter the classroom. It seems like a no-brainer: pass an exam, demonstrate knowledge of subject and pedagogy, become certified. But behind that one test is a much larger, dirtier machine: the network of teacher training colleges that are supposed to train candidates in the first place. That machine is going to be rebuilt. Currently, the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill is in a Joint Parliamentary Committee, which proposes to close three regulators — the University Grants Commission, the All India Council for Technical Education, and the National Council for Teacher Education — and replace them with one body, the Commission, which will function through three Councils for regulation, standards, and accreditation. This is neat on paper: one roof, one rulebook, less confusion. In fact, teacher education is entering this merger with a question that no one has fully answered: Will the amalgamation of teacher training into a huge, generalist Commission make our teachers better prepared, or will it simply make teacher training one more file in a much larger pile?
This is important for more reasons than you might think. Today, there are almost 17,752 teacher-training institutions in the country, all regulated by the NCTE. That’s more institutions than any other type of higher education, other than technical colleges. These are the places where the person who will eventually be sitting for TET learns how to teach — how to manage a classroom of forty children, how to explain fractions to a ten-year-old, how to handle a student who hasn’t eaten breakfast. No final exam can make up for the fact that these colleges are weak. TET is a test of whether a person has learned to teach. It can’t teach itself. The new Bill will establish minimum academic standards for teacher education by the Standards Council, and the Regulatory Council will determine who may run a teacher training college in the first place—a lot of responsibility on the Council, which will also be dealing with technical education and architecture. Teacher training is beset by its own problems — inadequate infrastructure, a shortage of qualified teachers to train teachers, and an abundance of low-quality private colleges that are simply in business to award degrees. Will a Council with three sectors on its plate give teacher education the focused attention it needs? Or will it be the sector that is looked at last, just because engineering colleges and architecture schools make more noise in policy rooms?
There’s another concern: who’s really in charge. The Bill enables the Regulatory Council to approve new institutions that grant degrees, but only after the central government has approved them. Unlike appeals to the markets regulator SEBI or the telecom regulator TRAI, appeals against the Council’s decisions are not directed to an independent tribunal but to the central government. This is the final say of the government of the day on whether a teacher training college can open, expand, or be closed. But it’s not always a bad thing the state has always had an interest in who trains our teachers. But it does raise a legitimate question: how independent is “quality control” when the people setting the standards are so much a part of the government’s approval process? Then there’s the money issue, which somehow always gets overlooked in these reform tales. The old UGC was not only setting rules but also giving out grants. The new Bill removes the Commission’s funding for the job and transfers it to the Ministry of Education. That could be a minor detail, but consider what it means to a teacher training college in a small town that is short of funds to improve its labs or to hire a qualified child psychology teacher. It’s easy to establish a “minimum standard” on paper. It’s expensive to help a failing college get to that standard, and now the body setting the standard is a different office from the body providing the money. Anyone who has ever had to work with the Indian bureaucracy will know what happens when the responsibility is divided up like that: things fall through the cracks.
None of this is to say that the Bill is a bad idea. Experts have long sought a single, less confusing regulatory system — indeed, the National Education Policy of 2020 called for just that. The issue isn’t the intent. The issue is between intention and design. Teacher education is not a little brother of technical education in one overcrowded Council if the government really desires better-prepared teachers coming out of training colleges and into classrooms. It must have its own clear voice, its own dedicated attention, and — most importantly — a clear connection between the standards it sets and the funds required to achieve them.
TET will continue to perform its duties at the exit gate, screening out those who are not ready. However, the exam was never going to be the solution to teacher quality in India. It must be based on what happened in the four years before the candidate’s first attempt. That’s the part of the story this Bill needs to get right — and right now, it’s an open question.
Ayush Kumar Upadhyay is an Advocate. He is also a Master’s student of Public Policy and Governance & LL.M. in Law and Social Policy
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are strictly the author’s own and do not represent the views of the publisher.