Wednesday, May 10, 2006

IITs recruiting European faculty ?


Update: There is a slightly better report (with some additional details) in the Indian Express; the positions don't look like they are permanent. And, the numbers are quite small. IIT-K director says the institute is considering some five potential candidates from EU.

Hmmm... This is interesting:

"We have already short-listed at least five teachers and discussions are on with the heads of different departments to recruit them on a permanent basis," said Dhande, while talking to TOI on Tuesday. He said that besides permanent recruitment, a few senior experts would be invited on contract basis to teach at the IITs.

And this paragraph is even more interesting:

The package offered by IITs was comparable to the remunerat ion paid by the European institutions in terms of PPP (Purchasing Power Parity).

4 Comments:

  1. Anonymous said...

    If the package is only `comparable', then why would people want to do that?

    I conjecture that someone will protest this; raising unemployment issues and so on.

  2. Anonymous said...

    Hi,
    If the financial package is "comparable" in terms of PPP - and i can only imagine that means
    a "good" sum of money by Indian standards, i cannot imagine it meaning anything else --- can
    i conclude that the newly recruited european faculty will earn more relative to the indian
    faculty?

    Obviously i must be wrong with the above conclusion. But i don't know what else the words
    "comparable" can mean.

    And if i am right that is simply crazy/dumb. If they can pay
    non-Indians a large sum of money to recruit them, they surely can do the same to Indians
    too.

    I must-must-must be wrong.

    viswanath

  3. Anonymous said...

    Do the IIT's currently have the power to put foreign nationals on their permanent pay roll list ?? I don't think so (correct me if i am wrong) .. atleast that's what my HOD (Dept of Aerospace Engg, IIT Madras) told me... Our dept is really short of profs..(see below) There was a likelyhood of a Chinese-American being brought in. And he was telling me that there are some procedural problems regarding putting foreign nationals on the permanent pay roll list and those rules were being modified. This was some time ago.. say early April

    And like anonymous .. i too feel he must be wrong.. A higher pay package to them just doesn't make sense.. And what's more important .. i still don't understand if hiring foreign nationals makes sense at all.. ?? I hope they


    (The Prof : Student ratio (I mean the number of profs to the number of "Undergraduate" students entering per year (which is around 35 at the moment, add another 10 for the M.Techs and another 5 or so for Ph.D) went down from 2:1 (i mean it.. there was a time when we had 25 profs and 12 undergraduate students entering per year) to the current 1:2)

  4. Abi said...

    Vishnu, Viswanath: The salary thingie is puzzling to me too. My guess is that EU may actually get involved in funding its citizens when they become faculty at the IITs (probably in return for something else -- students?). However, I agree that other measures -- such as a BIG increase in salary! -- can help fill up the vacancies with Indians themselves. Politically, I see no way that the number of expat faculty rising to any significant level.

    Ganesh: Yes, there are some additional hoops you have to jump through for recruiting foreign nationals. If one is desperate, however, I guess one would just have to jump through them.