Poor teacher-student ratios continue to afflict the quality of education at technical institutions, posing a challenge to efforts to translate India’s demographic dividend into economic benefit, a study has found.
The State of Working India 2026 report, released by the Azim Premji University last week, says teacher-student ratios at engineering and management institutes lag far behind the norms set by the All India Council for Technical Education. The report uses data from various government surveys.
The AICTE Handbook for 2024-27 prescribes teacher-student ratios of 1:20 for undergraduate engineering colleges, 1:15 for undergraduate courses in design and applied arts and crafts, and 1:25 for undergraduate management and computer institutes.
However, on average, there is one teacher for 28 students at private technical institutions and one for 47 students at their public counterparts, the report says.
It also flags the poor quality of education at the Industrial Training Institutes.
“The number of Industrial Training Institutes has increased by nearly 300 per cent, led largely by private ITIs. But this expansion has been accompanied by (a) decline in institutional quality, particularly among private providers,” the report says.
The report added: “The link between ITI training and employment remains tenuous with no perceptible association between (the) location of ITIs and (the) location of manufacturing firms.”
It says that graduate unemployment among those aged 25 or less is nearly 40 per cent while that among those aged between 25 and 29 is 20 per cent.
Demography trend
The report acknowledges that India’s youth population is poised to witness a substantial decline because of a fall in the fertility rate. But it emphasises that India remains a young country with a median age of 28 years — and in dire need of good technical education for its youth.
The report estimates India’s youth population — defined as the number of those aged 15 to 29 — to be about 36.7 crore in 2026, a year after the fertility rate is believed to have dipped below the replacement level of 2.1.
The youth population is projected to decline, for both men and women, to about 34.5 crore by 2036.
“India is nearing the peak of its demographic dividend, with the share of the working-age population expected to begin declining after 2030,” the report says.
“The 15 to 29-year-olds, India’s youth, number about 367 million and account for nearly a third of the working-age population. Of them, 263 million are not in education and constitute the potential workforce.”
It adds: “The pace of employment creation for this young generation in the coming decade will be critical (to) determining whether India’s demographic dividend can be translated into an economic one.”
Changing aspirations
Young Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe workers are increasingly less likely to be working in industries traditionally associated with their communities, the report says, underlining how changing aspirations have made the need for good skill education more acute.
For instance, in 1983, Dalit and tribal youths made up 40 per cent of the workforce from their communities employed in the leather and footwear industries. By 2023, their share had fallen to 24 per cent, the report says.