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Record W4415275718 · doi:10.1080/00220388.2025.2557930

The Myth and Reality of Teacher Shortage in India

2025· article· en· W4415275718 on OpenAlex
Sandip Datta, Geeta Kingdon

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Journal of Development Studies · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicSchool Choice and Performance
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersCenter for Emerging Infectious Diseases, University of IowaMinistry of Education, IndiaUniversity of OxfordUniversity College London
KeywordsEconomic shortageGovernment (linguistics)MythologyQuarter (Canadian coin)Safety netFalling (accident)Perception

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This paper examines the widespread perception in India that the country has an acute shortage of one million teachers in public elementary schools, a view repeated in India’s National Education Policy 2020. Our analysis of government’s DISE data shows that the median number of enrolled pupils in India’s 1.03 million public elementary schools is a mere 63 pupils, and that many tiny schools have surplus teachers. Adjusting those against the number of teacher vacancies yields a net deficit of only a quarter million teachers. Secondly, removing fake student enrolments converts this net deficit into a net surplus of about one hundred thousand teachers. Thirdly, we show that if government does its promised fresh recruitment to fill the supposed one-million teacher vacancies, the already modest mean pupil-teacher-ratio of 25.1 would fall to 19.9, permanently increasing fiscal cost by USD 8.7 billion per year in 2019–20 prices, which is higher than the individual GDPs of 50 poorest countries that year. The paper raises questions about minimum viable school-size, teacher-allocation norms, permissible maximum pupil teacher ratios, and teacher deployment.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.004
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.127
Threshold uncertainty score0.333

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0040.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.047
GPT teacher head0.377
Teacher spread0.331 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it