Unethical Practices in Recruitment of Teaching Staff at Universities in India: A Dead End of Ethical Academic & Administrative environment.

The higher education system in India has expanded rapidly over the past few decades. However, this growth is increasingly threatened by systemic corruption, cronyism, and arbitrary recruitment practices regarding faculty appointments. This paper examines the dominant forms of unethical recruitment practices across both public and private Indian universities and evaluates their long-term impact on institutional research output and global rankings. A mixed-methods conceptual framework analysing historical policy shifts by regulatory authorities alongside an evaluation of merit-dilution metrics. The findings reveal that favouritism, ideological stackings, regionalism, and the dilution of strict objective criteria (such as minimum PhD benchmarks) have degraded academic rigor. The paper argues that Indian academia has reached a "road end" where immediate, immutable digital oversight and decentralized, objective meritocracies are required to salvage the international credibility of its intellectual capital.

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