Ahmedabad: After opposing the Union Ministry
of Human Resource Development order on their pay structure,
the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, (IIM-A) faculty
council is awaiting response from Central government before
planning any future course of action.
"We are waiting for response from the Union government
before planning our course of action," a senior IIM-A faculty
council member said.
"As such we have already urged our director to delay its
implementation by a month. We will also take up this issue
with other institutes before deciding on future course of
action," he said.
The council had termed the union ministry's recent orders
on pay structure as infringement on academic freedom.
The HRD Ministry has recently come out with a fresh
notification on pay structure of centrally funded technical
institutions in which it said that the post of
lecturer-cum-post-doctoral fellows will be re-designated as
Assistant Professor and will be appointed on contract basis.
The government also put 40 per cent cap on promotion of
professor to senior grade on the basis of performance, which
led to wide resentment amongst the IIM-A faculty here.
One of the faculty members said that the new order also
imposes a cap on the number of domestic and international
conferences a professor can attend in a year.
"Its not within the remit of the government to tell an
institution like IIM-A that how many times will its professors
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.
Another faculty member said that the MHRD notification
that prescribes limit to the number of professors (40%) that
can exist as a proportion of the professor in the institute
drawing highest grade pay, was totally uncalled for.
He further said that 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
faculty council member added.
Bureau Report
First Published: Sunday, September 20, 2009, 22:50