Social work faculty workload in India: policy, practice, and challenges

The National Education Policy (NEP) mandates achieving a 50% GER, requiring Higher Education Institutions in India to recruit thousands of faculty members to maintain healthy workloads. However, teaching posts are seldom filled by the government with permanent faculty. As per PRS Legislative Research (2026), 29% of teaching posts in central universities and 35% in the Institutions of National Importance remained unfilled even in 2024, thus shooting off the recommended national level pupil teacher ratio (PTR) from the desirable 15:1 to 23:1. In this milieu, existing faculty members have called for just and transparent workload planning to avoid burnout, as the burden will fall on them. Against this backdrop, the authors examine faculty workload practices and the disciplinary challenges confronting social work education in India through a mixed-methods approach that includes document analysis and in-depth interviews with social work educators at select universities. The findings reveal that while official policy stresses a cadre-appropriate and equitable workload, the reality is far from that. In social work departments, faculty members face an undesirable workload, which creates stress and dilutes field instruction. The authors argue for discipline-sensitive workload planning as a means of transitioning to a higher GER ratio to counter these challenges.