This article engages with the emergence, explosive growth, tenacity and persistence of privately provided preservice teacher education (PSTE) in India. The phenomenon, its analysis, and sense-making call for complexity given the multiplicity of actors, institutions and interconnected phenomena involved. The article adopts a broadly historical-political-economic approach to explore, examine, describe and analyse the varied and dynamic interests in play. Two dimensions of the phenomenon are examined: the explosive growth of private teacher education (TE) and its drivers. We argue that ‘correspondence Bachelors in Education (BEd)’ transmogrified into the self-financed form as a result of the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE)’s attempts to regulate, and willy-nilly playing into and creating conditions favouring private TE and disempowering the university. We then look at the problem from the demand side to examine drivers for demand of low-quality, examining eight possible drivers, and finding strong links to the shifting nature of the teacher labour market. We conclude with observations on the effect of the transmogrification of distance education (DE) and the drivers of demand for low-quality in TE.
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