New Delhi: IIM and IIT professors are up in arms and have come together for the first time to reject the latest proposals of the Human Resource Development Ministry on pay scales and autonomy describing them as "infringement" on academic freedom.
The faculties of IITs and IIMs are working on a joint charter of demands to be handed to Union HRD Minister Kapil Sibal that includes better hikes and more autonomy.
"It is for the first time that IIT professors and IIM professors are sitting down together to discuss what is there in the Sixth Pay Commission and how it is affecting us," according to Dr Bharat Sheth, a Professor at IIT Mumbai.
The IIM-A faculty council has already met in Ahmedabad yesterday and opposed the HRD ministry's order on pay structure and asked the institute director to delay its implementation by a month, before future course of action is decided by them.
"Faculty council has termed the recent Union HRD ministry orders on pay structure as infringement on academic freedom, and has asked the institute director to postpone its implementation by a month," a senior faculty council member and IIM-A professor said after the council's meeting voicing disappointment.
The Council voiced its disappointed at the response of the HRD ministry to the memorandum seeking a pay hike that IIM and IIT professors had earlier submitted to the ministry.
IIM(A) also decided to take up the issue with other IIMs and
IITs and premier institutions like the IISc Bangalore.
Dr Sheth said the issues mainly was not of money and pay
but the issue is about autonomy, about flexibility, about
hiring. "Other Institutions like the NITs and IISc are also
affected and we are having discussions with them also."
Sheth said the unhappiness in the prestigious Centrally
Funded Technical Institutions (CFTIs) stems from the fact that
the HRD ministry is trying to micromanage these institutions.
The ministry's plans are going to be "very detrimental" to
the future of these institutions, he said.
The HRD ministry has recently come out with a fresh
notification on pay structure of CFTIs which said that the
post of lecturer-cum-post -doctoral fellows will be
re-designated as assistant professor.
They will be appointed on contract basis, it stated.
The government also put 40 percent cap on promotion of
professor to senior grade on the basis of performance, which
led to wide resentment amongst the IIM-A faculty here.
"The notification that prescribes limit to the number of
professors (40 percent) that can exist as a proportion of the
professor in the institute drawing highest grade pay, is
totally uncalled for," a senior faculty council member said.
"Promotion of the professors should be based only on
academic merit. It should be regardless of how many professors
already exists in any pay grade," the member said.
The member said the new order also imposes a cap on the
number of domestic and international conferences a professor
can attend during a year.
"It is not within the remit of the government to tell an
institution like IIM-A that how many times will its professors
will go for domestic and international conferences," he added.
The decision in this regard should be left to the
institute management, another senior member of the faculty
council said.
Bureau Report
First Published: Sunday, September 20, 2009, 22:17