Is College Professor right for you?

College Professors in India teach undergraduate and post-graduate students, conduct research, mentor doctoral candidates, and shape the academic life of a university — split structurally across two systems. The government / aided system (Delhi University, JNU, IITs / IIMs / NITs / IISc / IIITs, central universities, IISERs, and state universities) recruits primarily through the UGC-NET (National Eligibility Test) plus institutional interviews, governed by UGC pay scales (currently the 7th CPC pay matrix at Academic Levels 10-15 plus Vice-Chancellor scale) and the 2018 UGC Regulations. The private system (Ashoka, OP Jindal Global, Krea, Plaksha, Shiv Nadar, FLAME, BITS, Bennett, Manipal, Symbiosis, Christ, SRM, VIT, Amity) recruits via direct institutional searches, often without the UGC-NET requirement for Assistant Professors, and pays significantly higher cash compensation at top-tier private liberal-arts and STEM-research universities. The role spans teaching (typically 6-12 hours per week of classroom teaching, much higher in undergraduate-heavy government colleges), research (publish in peer-reviewed journals, secure SERB / DST / DBT / ICSSR / Wellcome / private grants), doctoral and post-graduate supervision, departmental administration, and increasingly public engagement and policy-adjacent work. Best-fit for those who genuinely love a discipline deeply enough to spend a lifetime on it — and who can survive the 5-7 year PhD bottleneck before stable income.