Fairness in pay hike recommendations

Another title for this post would be: Why did the university faculty unions accept the new pay regime that's so unfair towards their lecturers and readers?

* * *

How fair have the pay hike recommendations been across different levels in the IITs? How fair are they for our university faculty?

More specifically, are the pay raises for full professors roughly in line with those for assistant professors?

Such a comparison is difficult if one considers people who have been in service for a while -- they would have accumulated a bunch of increments depending on their employment history. The difficulty is due to the complex and different ways in which old salaries are mapped to the new ones.

However, this comparison is possible at the starting point for each position. Thus, I pose the question and answer it in the rest of the post:

If a person joins at the lowest salary in Level X (for which, let's assume he/she has just the right qualification) in December 2005, how large would her salary become in January 2006, the kick-off month for the new salary scheme?

This comparison is in terms of the basic pay (inflation adjustments will not affect this calculation, because they are a certain fraction of the basic pay).

In the old scheme, it would be the start of the salary scale, and in the new scale, it is the corresponding salary in the new scheme, which is the sum of the "Band Pay" and the "Academic Grade Pay."

Let me do this first for IIXs (where X=T, M, Sc, SER, ...):

Position	Old starting salary	New starting salary	Ratio
Full Professor	18,400	58,500 (48,000+10,500)	3.18
Associate Professor	16,400	52,300 (42,800+9,500)	3.19
Assistant Professor	12,000	38,000 (30,000+8,000)	3.17

Okay, the fairness question can be answered now. It's pretty fair.

The only problem is that many freshly recruited assistant professors come in with some increments; by a strange quirk, MHRD has mapped all their (old) salaries to the same new salary of 38,000! It's pretty bad: some 10 salary levels (i.e., 12,000 + 9 increments) have been grouped together, and they have been made equivalent to 38,000.

So, to this extent, the new pay regime is unfair towards the assistant professors. I believe one of the demands is for a better (preferably, 1-to-1) mapping of increments in the two scales.

I have already written about how assistant professors are demanding that they move automatically to Pay Band 4 after three years. This demand is likely to be accepted; if it happens, it's the corresponding ratio of old salary to the new one (at the minimum of the scale) will be nearly 3.5 (45,400 / 13,260). This is a good thing.

* * *

Let's now turn to how this shakes out for faculty members in universities. Here, the number of positions is larger.

Position	Old starting salary	New starting salary	Ratio
Professor	16,400	50,890 (40,890+10,000)	3.1
Reader	12,000	30,320 (22,320+8,000)	2.52
Senior Lecturer	10,000	25,600 (18,600+7,000)	2.56
Lecturer	8,000	21,600 (15,600+6,000)	2.7

If you keep your focus on the last column, the impact is clear: the new pay scheme is pretty unfair to faculty at lower levels.

There's another comparison that one can make across the two tables. In the old scheme, the starting salaries were the same for university professors and IIT associate professors -- Rs. 16,400. But their salaries in the new scheme favour the latter by nearly 3%.

Similarly, in the old scheme, the starting salaries of university readers and IIT assistant professors were the same: 12,000. In the new scheme, however, they are drastically different, however. While it is 30,300 for the former, it is 25 % higher for the latter at 38,000!

* * *

Thus, it would appear that the IIT faculty really do not have a case: their salary structure is a lot fairer than in the universities, and their relative position with respect to similarly situated university faculty is favourable. Then, where's the problem?

The problems are those that I described in my earlier post. The IIT faculty demand, mainly, that

• assistant professors move automatically to Pay Band 4 (like the university readers do), and

• the AGP for associate professors go up from 9,500 to 10,000 (as the university professors have got).

The second demand may appear trivial, but it's not. In the new regime, AGP is the status marker, and certain benefits are tied to the AGP. I also understand that the difference in AGP of 9,500 and 10,000 is pretty large in terms of a certain perks -- specifically, the transport allowance [Can someone confirm this?]. I'm not very sure about the exact quantum of the jump, but I'm told that it's substantial.

* * *

This little exercise makes me wonder why the university folks have accepted a deal that's so patently unfair towards their junior faculty. Is it because they don't care too much about their ability to attract talented youth to join their ranks? Or their faculty unions are loaded with the senior folks who just don't give a damn?

Inquiring minds would like to know.