India Has 5,000 Empty Faculty Seats. It’s Still Ghosting Returning Scientists.

Opaque hiring, lobby politics, and bureaucratic rot are squandering a rare opportunity.

Stanford postdoc. Six months waiting. Zero acknowledgement. That’s how India welcomes its returning scientists.

A young researcher applied for a faculty position at an elite Indian institute after her Stanford stint. She expected tough competition. What she got instead was silence—no interview, no rejection, no explanation. Her application simply vanished.

“It goes into a black hole,” says a senior faculty member familiar with the case. “The entire process takes several months, and it’s very bureaucratic. They don’t even reply to the applicant’s email. If you’re not selected, you’re not told why.”

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Here’s the thing: this is happening at the worst possible time.

Trump’s H-1B policy just added a $100,000 fee increase. Indians hold over 70% of all H-1B visas. The uncertainty has been building since 2017, pushing researchers to reconsider long-term US careers. Meanwhile, Europe is aggressively poaching talent—Germany’s Skilled Immigration Act, France’s Talent Passport.

India has a rare window. About 550 researchers returned under the Ramanujan Fellowship this decade. The government is designing new schemes with setup grants for labs. The DST Secretary told media they’re planning programmes to attract scientists “in the current geopolitical situation.”

The talent is finally flowing back. And Indian academia is fumbling the catch.

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The problems run deep. At one top institute, a returnee’s application wasn’t processed due to reservation category mismatches—”departments fighting over general slots, almost no general hires,” according to someone who knows both sides.

But reservation isn’t the core issue. Faculty posts are vacant across all categories. IIT Kanpur needs 1,000 faculty for its 10,000 students. It has 600. A March 2025 parliamentary report revealed 56% of professor positions at IITs, IIMs, NITs, and IISERs sit empty.

The real rot is cultural. “What matters, honestly speaking, is which group or lobby you belong to,” says an IIT professor who also teaches at a US university. “If you’re not from these lobbies, it’s very difficult to enter or survive.” Certain communities hire their own. Faculty members recruit their former students. State universities demand bribes for permanent positions. Anna University uncovered 2,000 cases of fake faculty appointments in one academic year—one person employed by 32 colleges simultaneously.

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Even when researchers get hired, the ecosystem can’t support them.

Western professors have dedicated labs. Indian scientists share generic, all-purpose facilities. Setting up a proper research lab costs ₹10-15 crore, plus running costs, equipment, assistants, sensors, raw materials. “The institute has to be very liberal for someone used to abundance in the West to think of coming back,” says a senior engineer connected to aerospace and defence R&D.

Then there’s academic freedom. PhD admissions run through reservation quotas that don’t match project needs. A professor might want an excellent SC candidate, but the available slot is for OBC. “When they don’t get that academic freedom, they’re not going to enter the IIT system.”

The infrastructure gap means even fixing hiring won’t fix outcomes. Scientists either won’t come, or won’t stay.

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India scrapped 300 science awards in 2022 after the same corruption plagued that system. The reset worked. Similar thinking could apply to hiring: transparency mandates, external reviewers for all appointments, digital verification to catch ghost faculty.

The ANRF could offer repatriation grants—not fellowships, but ₹15-20 crore capital grants for returning scientists to build labs exactly as they envision. Reports suggest the government is considering setup grants in new re-entry schemes.

But none of this matters without enforcement. The Anna University scandal only broke because a civil society group exposed it. A national academic integrity commission with suo motu powers could build vigilance into the system instead of waiting for whistleblowers.

The talent is knocking. The geopolitics align. Indian academia needs to decide whether it wants to answer the door—or keep pretending nobody’s home.

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Credit: Based on reporting by Karan Kamble | Read full article on Swarajya