A billboard at the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay campus said in bold letters: ‘Dignity at Stake’. That was the slogan by protesting faculty at IITs across the country, the first such protest in the half-century since the first IIT was set up in Kharagpur. The protest is against a new pay scale, approved by the Cabinet on August 7, which falls short of what was recommended by the Govardhan Committee, and is also said to be inferior in some ways to what the faculty at general-purpose universities have been given by the University Grants Commission. At the top of the scales, directors at the IITs and similar prestigious institutions (the Indian Institutes of Management, the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and the National Institute of Industrial Engineering will get Rs 80,000 per month. The IITs’ protesting faculty are asking for additional ‘scholastic pay’ of Rs 15,000, to compensate (among other things) for the additional task of mentoring new IITs. IIM staff, too, is unhappy and unsure about when the salary revision will be implemented. However, IIM faculty usually has the cushion of additional income from consultancy assignments, which most IIT faculty do not get.
The government should take the protest seriously. The IITs employ over 4,000 full-time teachers. Yet, they have 20 per cent vacancies in faculty posts, and this number has been growing at an unprecedented rate since 1999—when pay was last revised. The staff shortage could get worse when the new IITs and IIMs that the government has announced are set up and start functioning. Without proper faculty, it will be hard for these elite institutions (which have contributed so much to the international image of India’s higher education system) to maintain their standards, let alone improve on them, as they should.
The structural problem, if one can call it that, is the overall limit on government salaries, as fixed by the Pay Commission. Typically, these set the ceiling for academic salaries as well. Both fail to recognise the gap between even the post-Pay Commission salaries and those prevailing in the private sector. If the gap is not narrowed somewhat, teaching becomes a less than attractive profession, even for those inclined to stay on in the groves of academe. Those in the higher echelons of the government have compensations in the form of a large canvas on which to paint, and the exercise of considerable power; teaching faculty have neither.
The Indian higher education sector is the third largest in the world, with over 14 million students and half a million teachers. However, India’s gross enrolment ratio or GER (defined as the ratio of number of pupils enrolled, regardless of age, and divided by number of persons in the relevant age group) for higher education is 11 per cent, compared to the world average of 23 per cent, 36.5 per cent for countries in transition and 55 per cent for the developed countries. India probably needs 1,500 universities (430 exist today) if it is to attain its admittedly ambitious GER target of 15 per cent by 2012. And it is not going to get there without qualified teachers.
