Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Meanwhile on the IIT faculty salary front ...


The Committee headed by Prof. Goverdhan Mehta has submitted its report to MHRD, so the official announcement about what it has recommended (and about how much of it is acceptable to the government) will be out soon. The expectation is that it could be out as early as this weekend.

In the meantime, Charu Sudan Kasturi has tried hard to extract some information from MHRD officials about the Mehta Committee recommendations. Here are the results of his efforts:

Faculty at the IITs, IIMs and other technical education institutions will receive salary hikes accompanied by a bouquet of perks and research incentives under a pre-election package to be unveiled by the government.

Besides, teachers in hundreds of university engineering colleges and in the National Institutes of Technology will for the first time receive higher pay than provided by the University Grants Commission [...]

The committee in its report, however, has not accepted a demand of teachers at the NITs that their pay be brought on a par with that of IIT faculty. “The NITs and university teachers of technical education will receive a pay a step higher than other university teachers. The IITs and IIMs will receive a take-home salary another step high,” the official said.

An earlier panel had on an average recommended a salary hike of 70 per cent — the Mehta committee’s recommendations, sources indicated, could improve that by around 10 per cent.

It's not much, but hey, we take whatever comes our way.

But, as I said, an official announcement should be out anytime during the next few days. Let's wait and watch...

22 Comments:

  1. Anonymous said...

    those who benefit must also demand that similar benefits are given to people in the humanities and also those teaching in the universities. these policies are lopsided and should be rejected by all sane people.

  2. Anonymous said...

    Does this cover private (autonomous/university-affiliated) engineering colleges that follow the AICTE pay scale?

  3. Rahul Siddharthan said...

    In my opinion the 6th pay commission salaries are already plenty for a permanent government job that comes with lots of perks. We need higher salaries to attract better people, but such salaries MUST be linked to performance, and also, as anonymous says, people in other places (universities) must be able to compete for them. I would suggest the US system, where only a "basic" salary is paid directly to you and you top it up through grants (and can earn a lot that way). Then you could in theory sit in Meerut University and earn more than the topmost IIT professor, but you'd have to spend as much time writing grant proposals as, well, a typical professor in the US does. Or you could sit in an IIT and do nothing to earn your salary, but you'd then earn a basic salary comparable to lower administrative staff.

  4. Anonymous said...

    I agree with Rahul that IIT salaries plus perks are already very very generous. IITs (but not IISc) are terminally ill, but not at all because compensation is inadequate! But "you'd have to spend as much time writing grant proposals as a typical professor in the US" sounds scary, given the additional burden of doing research and writing papers for one's students. A majority of IIT students, including BTechs, cannot write a coherent paragraph paraphrasing an abstract, leave alone produce their own material.

  5. Anonymous said...

    Who said IISc is not terminally ill?

    There are a lot of fossils floating about wasting valuable resources. I beileve some of them have been in the campus for over 45 years with questionable achievements.

  6. Anonymous said...

    The linking of performance to salaries is not a good idea in India, where there is *no* system of judging or awarding merit.

    The chairmen of the committees who decide three major awards (Swarnajayanti, Bhatnagar and J.C. Bose) of the country are above 70 years of age, have published less than 100 papers (with minimal citations) in their lifetime. If the committees themselves have such poor people, how can the people given these awards be any good?

    The winners of these awards earn a lot more money than the people who have not won these awards. Currently, these award winners get Rs. 25000 per month plus regular salary plus huge grants. This huge salary difference then creates more problems in the institutes.

    Abinanandan calls these awards as the Oscars of science in India maybe because these awards are given because of "connections" / publicity and it is not because of merit.


    Anyone familiar with the grant awarding agencies and their committees know that the highest grants are often given to the person who is able to "influence" the chairman of the committee and it has hardly to do much with merit.


    The person who says above that IITs are terminally ill but IISc is not is mistaken. There is no difference between all these institutions. But the way to correct it is NOT to link the salary with performance unless there is an objective, rational and fair way of judging merit and performance.

    Kumar

  7. Anonymous said...

    I should have said, I know that many IITs are terminally ill, but I do not have evidence that IISc is terminally ill. Is IISc under as much pressure as IITs to become a mediocre, overloaded, undergraduate degree mill?

  8. Anonymous said...

    >IISc under as much pressure as IITs to become a > mediocre, overloaded, undergraduate degree mill?

    the western standards of doing scientific research is very high and different and there is a whole gamut of issues besides salary. Salary is very important since it relates to standard of living but development of scientific infrastructure is very important too.

  9. Anonymous said...

    Performance-linked salary is perhaps not a good idea but things like faculty perks, extension beyond retirement age certainly need to be made conditional to a rigorous evaluation. Whether it is IITs, IISc or universities, there are people who perform well on the research front in the sea of mediocrity. It is beyond my comprehension as to why university teachers doing equally well (or even better) in research get less than their counterparts in IITs or IISc. We seem to be ignorant of the simple fact that bulk of our higher educational system is rooted in universities, not in IITs.

  10. Anant said...

    Bulk of our population works in the fields and works very hard producing food, but does not get to eat. It is the same phenomenon, what?

  11. Giri@iisc said...

    Mr. Kumar is incorrect in saying that "Currently, these award winners get Rs. 25000 per month plus regular salary plus huge grants."

    The Swarnajayanthi and J.C Bose Fellowships do get Rs. 25,000 per month but that is only for five years. The Bhatnagar winners get Rs. 15,000 per year till they retire. In addition, there are several fellowships which pay from Rs. 75,000 per month to Rs. 5,000 per month (in addition to salary).

    The reason for giving personal pay for these awards was exactly similar to what Rahul had proposed - performance linked pay. Any one, whether in univs or IITs or IISc, can apply for these awards and fellowships. There are professors in universities (like Hyderabad university, fr example) who earn higher than an IIT professor because of these schemes.

  12. Anonymous said...

    Giri@iisc : I believe what Kumar is trying to say is that is NOT performance related pay. He is saying that these huge additional incomes are generated through contacts and other non-academic considerations. Yes, any one can apply as it is a free (?) country, but even meritorious unconnected persons will never get any of these schemes. You have glossed over this.

  13. Giri@iisc said...

    I only wanted to correct Kumar's statement on the actual fellowship amounts that are awarded. Further, these awards were indeed instituted with the idea of performance related pay.

    Whether they are successful or not (as Kumar feels) in actually rewarding merit is a different question.

  14. Anonymous said...

    Many people I know think that getting one paper accepted in Nature or Scientific American is worth much more prestige than Swarnajayanti can ever amount to. Colonial servility or recognition of reality? To be fair, SJ awardees are mostly fairly talented. But there are notable warts too. One recipient was caught manufacturing experimental data and quietly put away, around 2000/2001.

  15. Unknown said...

    Those who are currently criticizing the IIT faculties and IIT systems for having higher pay scales must remember that every guardian in this country wants that his/her ward must get in to any IIT for a technical degree from B.Tech , M.Tech or Ph.D. Why???? the answer of this "WHY" shall satisfy the pay structure of faculty of IITs. The same is not true with any other institutional system in India.

  16. Anonymous said...

    To R.N

    I think everybody wants to get into IIT or IISc system, because those are the institutes that are well funded and equipped compared to other institutions/universities. If you have many such institutions/universities then this rush for IIT/IISc wont be there.
    Our system creates hypes around istitution/personalities and always keeps control over the supply side down, this inflates the value of IITs/IISc.

    If one would normalise the out put of IIT/IISc interms of the facility and fundings then you would know that its same as other institutions/universities in India.

  17. Unknown said...

    Dear Mr. Anonymous,

    I know that you can write anything but you donot have the courage to write your name. Probably you might have not seen any IITs. It is not only the infrastucture, equipment and funding which attracts people but the level of graduate/undergraduate technical education attracts the mass. Even some new IITs which are opened/operated in a rented builiding are also center of attractions for every one but not a well stablished university. So you can not compare any other system with IITs.

  18. Unknown said...

    6th Pay Commission

    By the 6th pay commission a discrimination has been created amongst the
    pensioners. 6th pay commission's differential benefits to pensioners from
    January 1st 2006 is in contravention of laws laid down by honorable
    Supreme Court....

    READ MORE >> www.right2info.com

  19. Unknown said...

    why is the delay taking place. the engineering college teachers are the only people currently without any pay revision or even a firm assurance about it.

  20. Unknown said...

    the draft ugc regulations if implemented would make the life of teachers miserable and frustrating

  21. Unknown said...

    all teachers must oppose the implementation of the draft ugc regulations. the teacher community is the only one who puts in so much of effort in acquiring the academic excellance as compared to the counterparts but is still a neglected stuff.

  22. Anonymous said...

    Check out teacher salary information at Jobnob.com, they have an extensive list of what the norm is around the country for this issue.