Thursday, February 24, 2011

Unfilled faculty positions in India's elite institutions


Altogether, IITs have a sanctioned strength of 4,712 teaching posts, but only 3,148 are filled. The vacacny stands at 1,564 posts. IIMs have a combined faculty strength of 555 teaching posts, but only 455 are filled. There is a vacancy of 100 posts. National Institutes of Technology have 4,632 posts, but there is a vacany for 1,522 slots. Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, has 150 vacancies. Out of 518 posts, only 368 are filled.

These details are from the information given to the Lok Sabha by HRD Minister of State D. Purandeswari.

8 Comments:

  1. Rahul Siddharthan said...

    I see this as good, actually: all the above organisations can hire the best candidates as they are found! Once you reach your sanctioned strength, you can hire only against retirements or other departures. I'm not sure that the implication in your post, that "sanctioned strength" is a sort of "desirable strength" that must be reached as quickly as possible, is correct. In practice, at least, it works as a maximum permissible strength -- the institution should not grow larger than that.

  2. Anonymous said...
    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
  3. Abi said...

    @Rahul: 30 percent is still too large, no? Especially in institutions -- such as NITs -- where the existing faculty members carry a large teaching load.

  4. Abi said...

    @jbeck: Thanks for the snark. But please use your ingenuity to make your point without naming specific people. I won't allow my blog to be used by commenters to defame people -- your comment is worse, because you make it appear as if I share your sentiments about those people.

    I'm re-posting your comment, but replaced the specific names with X and Y:
    You said: How much of this vacancy consists of "reserved" seats? If it is Tamil Nadu (NIT and IIT) that can be easily fixed, all you need to do is find some politician's family. And not to forget the rationalization that are sure to follow, -Casteist-brahminical-Hindu-Corporate reactionaries (like X and Y I guess) are preventing the hiring of deserving Dalit and Minority candidates on the dubious grounds of "merit"

  5. Ankur Kulkarni said...

    Does any one know what the distribution of vacancies is across disciplines?

  6. Anonymous said...

    Abi,

    While much of their analysis is admirably data-driven, I wish they didn't take a loose, evidence-free swipe at the reservation policy:

    [[There is also a real need now to assess the consequences of the caste based reservation system. Where has 50 years of reservation taken us, in a world where no quotas are applied in competitive activity?]]

    The issue may appear in the form of a hard-nosed question about the consequences of reservation, but this sort of rhetoric is intellectually lazy -- as lazy, in fact, as that flowing in the opposite direction: where has 60+ years of upper caste domination of higher education and scientific research taken us?


    http://nanopolitan.blogspot.com/2010/11/science-in-india-quantity-need-not-mean.html#comments

    Glad to know you don't share my views. And also that you consider both kinds of speculation lazy. But it seems to be a distinction without a difference.

    Check out my response to your earlier post.
    This is your blog so you make the rules. Let's at least admit that hiring quality faculty and using affirmative action to hire under-represented groups are two different objectives - not irreconcilable, neither one worth pursuing as a substitute for the other, and worth pursuing simultaneously.

  7. Abi said...

    @jbeck: You said, Let's at least admit that hiring quality faculty and using affirmative action to hire under-represented groups are two different objectives - not irreconcilable, neither one worth pursuing as a substitute for the other, and worth pursuing simultaneously.

    Oh, please! Is there anything in the body of the post that even smells of reservation? While you are free to obsess over affirmative action, let's at least admit that data may be, at times, just data...

    @Ankur: I don't have any idea about the break-up, but my guess is that the shortfall is roughly uniform -- 30 % -- across the disciplines, with somewhat higher figures for CS and EE.

  8. Anonymous said...

    Abi,

    Point taken.

    But the IITs and NITs are heavily oriented towards the "dry sciences", - physical science driven disciplines, rather than the "wet sciences" or life science driven disciplines. With the expansion of life science research institutions in India and the droves of scientists returning from the US (where non-medical life science research is being starved of funding by a creationist republican majority in the Congress) is staffing life science departments really a problem?