Indicate the number of Regional Offices of the National Council for Teacher…

Concept: For a statutory regulator, the founding Act fixes the body's regional structure, while the body's own organisational record fixes how many offices actually serve that structure; a question about the number of regional offices is settled by reading the two together. For teacher education in India that founding Act is the National Council for Teacher Education Act, 1993.

Application: Section 20(1) of the NCTE Act, 1993 constitutes four Regional Committees, namely Northern, Southern, Eastern and Western, and Section 3(3) places the Council's head office at Delhi. NCTE's own organisational record for this period, its Annual Report for 2011-12 and the Regional Committee listing on the NCTE website, shows each of those four Regional Committees functioning from a single regional office:

Cross-check: The Act does not by itself cap the number: Section 3(3) allows the Council to open further offices elsewhere and Section 20(2) allows additional Regional Committees, in both cases with the prior approval of the Central Government. What settles the count is the organisational record, which notifies no such additional region and lists exactly the four regional offices above; the Delhi head office is a head office, not a regional office, and is therefore not counted among them. The official UGC-NET June 2012 Paper-I answer key records the same count.

Hence the National Council for Teacher Education has 04 Regional Offices.