New rules for student-teacher ratio at universities

All Central Universities and Deemed to be Universities will need to have at least one teacher for every 10 students for their post-graduate programmes in science and one for every 25 students at the undergraduate level, as per new regulations of the University Grants Commission (UGC).

The UGC regulations prescribe a varied set of required teacher-student ratio for different streams of studies in addition to laying down strictures that the workload of the teacher should not be less than 40 hours a week for 30 working weeks in an academic year.

The new regulations were adopted on recommendations of a committee led by Prof J A K Tareen, former member of the UGC and Vice Chancellor Puducherry University.

The committee had said uniform norms for student-teacher ratio were difficult to arrive at as various factors, including enrollment at different levels and specialisations determine them.

For PG programmes, the new regulations make it mandatory for Universities to have at least one teacher for every 10 students for science, and media and mass communication studies, and one teacher for every 15 pupils for humanities, social sciences each as well as for commerce and management.

The Under Graduate programmes will need to have at least one pedagogue for every 15 students in the media and mass communication departments, while the teacher-student ratio should be 1:30 for social sciences and 1:25 for the science stream.

Norms laid down earlier for teachers' workload require 16 hours of direct teaching for lecturers and senior lecturers and 14 hours for readers and professors.