The All India IIT Faculty Federation (AIITFF) has decided to temporarily suspend its agitation over the pay hike of the faculty members at the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). The federation said it had sought a meeting with Union Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Kapil Sibal next week to discuss the issue.
“After the meeting between the HRD ministry and IIT directors on September 2, we got an impression that the issue has been resolved. We, however, have not received anything in black and white from the MHRD (Ministry of Human Resource Development). Our future course of action will depend on the kind of a formal communication we get from the MHRD,” said a faculty member from IIT Delhi today.
On September 2, the ministry made a presentation to the IIT directors on how the IIT salaries were better than the UGC ones. An IIT director said on condition of anonymity: “I am satisfied with the discussions that took place and hope that the IIT system too agrees to the same.”
Sibal had assured them that their grievances would be considered positively.
The IIT faculty members were earlier planning to approach Sibal on September 6 to present their case. The federation had given the ministry a deadline till September 4 to come up with a solution on this matter.
The IIT faculty members have been demanding that assistant professors should be placed in a higher pay band, besides performance-related “scholastic pay” and compensation to aspiring faculties for the time they spend in research before taking up teaching as a profession.
Faculty of some IITs had staged stikes recently in protest against the new pay regime passed by the Union Cabinet last month based on the recommendations of the Goverdhan Mehta Committee report.