Concerns about the professional development of teachers have a political dimension as governments around the world engage in the discourse on global standards and want to improve the quality of their school education. Increasingly, teachers are feeling the pressure of securing high achievement scores and large-scale assessments of student learning by external agencies are increasingly used as indicators of teacher quality and as evidence to argue for improved teacher preparation programmes. In India, the issue of teacher training was flagged early in the policy discourse around Indian education, and the Education Commission of 1966 discussed this subject. Between 1995 and 2000, the number of teacher education institutes in India increased seven-fold, and much of this expansion occurred in the private sector. This has led to a sharp decline in the quality of teacher education programmes, and the recent report of the high-powered commission on teacher education, constituted by the Supreme Court, is timely and its recommendations need to be taken seriously. The members of the commission included eminent educationists like Goverdhan Mehta, M. Anandakrishnan, R. Govinda, Mrinal Miri, A.K.S. Sharma and Poonam Batra. The long and consistent stand on teacher education taken by the members is clearly seen in the report. The commission, chaired by Justice J.S. Verma, tabled its report in August 2012. Subsequently, the Central Advisory Board on Education (CABE), the highest advisory body to advise the central and state governments in the field of education, at its 60th meeting, approved the recommendations made by the commission. Acknowledging that teacher education is a subject of great national importance, the commission has underlined the need to establish a national-level academic body that can continually review teacher education programmes and look into the development of resources, both human and material, required to run these programmes. This article concludes that the Justice Verma Commission on Teacher Education has comprehensively reviewed the various issues and concerns related to teacher education in the Indian context, and its recommendations are in keeping with the existing policy framework for the universalisation of quality education. However, as Justice Verma has said in the report, such exercises can have the desired effect only after implementation.