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| IIT faculty take casual leave to protest against snipped pay hike |
| Pradipta Mukherjee / Kolkata Aug 22, 2009, 00:10 IST |
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Faculty at the premier Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) are irked at the new pay scale that was approved by the Cabinet on August 7, prompting many professors in the IITs to go on casual leave as a token protest today. The directors of all IITs are scheduled to meet in Chennai on Sunday to discuss how to raise the concerns expressed by their faculty with the Union human resource development ministry.
B K Mathur, placements chairman of IIT-Kharagpur, said, "The executive committee of all IITs will meet and discuss the next course of action. We had better expectations from the new pay scale."
IIM staff, too, is unhappy and unsure about how much they have gained since it's not clear when the salary revision will be implemented. The IIMs had demanded that their directors receive a fixed salary of Rs 90,000 a month.
The new pay regime, instead, doles out Rs 80,000 a month for directors at the IITs, IIMs, the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, IISc in Bangalore and the National Institute of Industrial Engineering.
Directors at the NITs, IIITs and ISM Dhanbad will receive Rs 75,000 a month, along with a special allowance of Rs 5,000 — a salary on a par with university vice-chancellors. The special allowance is not considered while calculating benefits like the dearness allowance.
IIT faculty members stand to suffer more than IIM staff from the new rule since they depend solely on their salary unlike IIMs where the faculty members earn handsomely from consultancy assignments.
Meanwhile, the token protest may escalate into something bigger. For one, established IITs are expected to stop mentoring the new IITs with immediate effect. The faculty at IIT-Roorkee, for instance, will take four days earned leave after the mass casual leave, confirmed professors and students at the IIT.
IIT teachers connected with administrative jobs are also expected to resign from their administrative posts as a mark of protest against the new pay scale. The faculties at IIT-Kanpur and IIT-Chennai are said to have already passed a resolution to this effect, said Kanchan Chowdhury, president, IIT-Kanpur Teachers’ Association who is also an office bearer of All India IIT Faculty Federation.
At IIT Madras, the faculty has decided to stop taking classes at the institute and also intends to stop mentoring the new IIT at Hyderabad.
Sukumar Nandi, a professor at IIM-Lucknow (IIM-L) said, "The students batch of 2008 got median salary of Rs 9 lakh a year, which was quite low last year due to the economic slowdown. Compared to that, an IIM professor earns around Rs 36,000 per month. It is not only demotivating but also insulting for us considering the quality we churn out from the institutes every year."
Another professor of IIM Calcutta, who requested anonymity, said, "The revision in pay scale has not been implemented and so we are not sure exactly what our net gain in salary will be. On an average, we expect a 20-28 per cent hike on our existing pay scale."
A professor of IIT Kanpur concurred: "The revision ignores the real problem facing the IITs and IIMs — how to attract young teachers and retain current faculty. It does not provide a solution to the faculty shortage problem."
Currently, the IIMs employ over 700 full-time professors and IITs employ over 4,000 in the several departments and centres of excellence. The IITs and IIMs have between 20 and 30 per cent vacancies in faculty posts, cumulatively growing at an unprecedented rate since 1999 when the pay was last revised.
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