Despite claims of expansion, inclusion and maintaining high standards in higher education sector of the country, IITs, the premiere engineering institutes in the country, are facing a massive shortage of teachers with over one-third positions lying vacant.
Official statistics reveal that the highest number of vacant posts of teachers lie in IIT Kharagpur at 299 followed by IIT Mumbai at 222, IIT Roorkee at 194, IIT Madras at 138 and IIT Delhi at 78. The vacancies in IIT Kanpur stand at 69, IIT Guwahati at 65 and IIT Ropad at 48. Official sources stated that the situation of vacancies was somewhat similar at all 15 IITs in the country.
An internal study conducted by the Union human resource development ministry has revealed that the institutes have one of the poorest teacher-student ratio when compared to its counterparts in other countries. The IITs have a teacher-student ratio of 1:15 while other international prestigious organisations have much better teacher-student ratio like Harvard 1:7, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Hong Kong and National University of Singapore have a ratio of 1:5. While University of Michigan, has a ratio of 1:6.
Official sources stated that presently there was a provision for maintaining a teacher-student ratio of 1:10 at IITs. However, in all about 34.2 per cent of all teachers posts are lying vacant in IITs across the country. With the government proposing to open up the higher education market for international educational institutes, the situation is expected to worsen.
“The foreign players will also affect the existing faculty strength as they will try and recruit teachers from India as well,” sources said.
In an effort to prevent this expected exodus the HRD ministry has already proposed more incentives for IIT faculty members. A performance-related incentive scheme for existing teachers and faculty has been proposed which will also take into account the performance of teachers in research work and publications.