Wanted! A few good teachers

Updated on: Monday, September 07, 2009

Recently, the Medical Council of India (MCI) inspected five medical colleges (names withheld) and found them short of 31 professors, 148 associate professors, 271 assistant professors, 47 tutors, 153 senior residents and 32 junior residents! Altogether, there was a shortage of 497 teachers and 180 resident staff as per the MCI’s minimum proposed faculty strength for medical colleges. If this continues, the colleges risk losing MCI recognition. The question however is — is there any point in opening new colleges, as announced by the government?

Faculty shortage has become such a critical problem in India that it recently prompted Bharat Bhasker, a Senior Professor of IT and Systems at IIM Lucknow, who is also a visiting professor at ESSEC Business School, Paris, France and University of Texas, Dallas, USA, to lament that there is little hope for growth in a country where apex institutes are producing less than 10 doctoral IT students a year!

Ten years ago, The UN Rao committee in 2000-01 had assessed that Indian engineering institutions required 26,130 Ph.Ds and 34,840 M.Techs, of which only 5,862 Ph.Ds and 11,035 M.Techs were available. That’s a shortfall of over 70 per cent! The situation worsened in 2007, when the government directed all institutes of higher learning, including the IITs, to reserve 54 per cent of their seats for SC/ST students from 2007 onwards. The average faculty shortage at the IITs is 15 to 20 per cent.

Even in Delhi University’s College of Engineering (DCE) the faculty, shortage is almost 40 per cent. The prestigious Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) also face a shortage of faculty members. It is reported that the six IIMs were short by at least 100 teachers in all. IIM Kozhikode has only 17 faculty members against the sanctioned strength of 40, i.e., a 58 per cent shortage followed by Kolkata with a 20 per cent shortage and Bengaluru with a 17 per cent faculty shortage. (March 2007, PTI).

The state of affairs at self- financed institutes is better. They can at least take the deemed university route to bank on visiting professors and guest faculty, but the situation is deplorable at super specialty colleges and skill-based clinical programmes, such as pharmacy and radiology.

Recently, Ananthakrishnan N, writing on the Acute shortage of teachers in medical colleges: Existing problems and possible solutions, a thought paper that appeared in the National Medical Journal of India 2007, suggested shared resources as a means to overcome staff shortage in critically deficient areas. Such precedents exist in more developed countries. This won instant support from the Union HRD Minister Kapil Sibal who concedes that IT makes resource sharing possible between institutes.

Meanwhile, other institutes are experimenting with other models. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) for instance, is in the process of establishing a dedicated research university to produce doctoral level talent for engineering and technology institutes. This is important as a study by NASSCOM found that over 15,000 Professors of IT and Computer Sciences were not up-to-mark.

As per statistics available with the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), there were 1,668 engineering institutes in 2006, of which only 15 to 20 per cent in the Tier I category could claim adequate infrastructure and competent teachers. In the rest, there was an average 25 per cent shortage, while in some the vacancies were as high as 75 per cent!

Experts contend that the reason for this is the pittance paid to qualified teachers, who eventually get weaned away. An assistant professor gets a salary of Rs 25,000, while a full professor earns no more than Rs 33,000 per month. The UGC is considering a hike in pay scales and experts hope that the AICTE will follow suit. Meanwhile, private managements are doing everything — permitting teachers to do consultancy work, funding junkets to international conferences and finding sponsors for staff research in a desperate bid to retain them. Until things improve, we will continue to bleed talent.

Wanted! A few good teachers

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