MUMBAI, Oct. 19 -- Colleges across the city are facing a growing crisis of surplus teaching staff, with nearly 15%-20% of teachers likely to be marked as surplus due to the lack of new government guidelines for calculating teaching workload under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. Teachers who are declared surplus run the risk of not being able to teach in their respective college and being sent to a different college that has a shortfall. They could otherwise go without spending a single day in class in their college, but paid their monthly remuneration. In the long term, the posts could also be dissolved. The confusion has created serious concern among principals and teachers, who fear this might lead to job insecurity for many in aided colleges. The Department of Higher Education currently has no approved format or system to sanction teaching posts under the revised NEP structure. "We are already in the third year of NEP implementation. The structure of courses has changed completely-students now study major, minor, and open elective subjects. This means the number of students enrolled in each subject has reduced compared to earlier years," said a principal from a Mumbai college. Under the previous system, for example, one language teacher was assigned to teach every 25 students per division. With the new system of electives, the strength in each subject has dropped. "As per data revealed under RTI on December 31, 2024, as many as 11,918 posts are still vacant," teacher representative Kushal Mude said. He urged the government to implement 'Mission Mode' recruitment within 100 days, and issue a clear workload formula as per NEP guidelines. "The batch size for science streams is clearly defined as 15, 12, and 12 for the three years of BSc. It is similar to 2017, so there is no reason to delay recruitment."...