"India can do with less engineers and doctors, but it cannot do with such acute dearth of good teachers. Today's youths are into the far more lucrative race of other professions, viz. engineering, media, management etc. as they fetch fat packages," Kumar said.

He threw a poser at the policy makers: "Do we have teachers of the kind that produced luminaries like CV Raman, Homi jehangir Bhabha and Dr Rajendra Prasad? Those teachers may not have high sounding degrees and diplomas, but they had the passion of teaching and that reflected in what they did with their students," Anand who coached free of cost 30 underprivileged students for IITs for the last one decade, said.