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| IIT Kharagpur faculty during a hunger strike on September 5 |
Sept. 21: IIT faculty have issued a 10-day ultimatum to the human resource development ministry to resolve a protracted pay dispute, deciding to go on a token hunger strike on September 24.
The IITs have also demanded that the ministry revoke a new recruitment rule that they fear could rob them of bright professors from foreign institutions and research laboratories.
This new rule for the first time bars the IITs and the IIMs from hiring professors who have not earlier taught for at least four years as associate professors — a rung below — at a select band of Indian institutions.
The new rule effectively means that even a Nobel laureate is ineligible to teach as a professor at the IITs and IIMs unless he taught at these select institutes earlier.
At a meeting on the Salt Lake campus of IIT Kharagpur today, heads of faculty associations of all the IITs formulated a strategy to challenge a revised pay regime that they allege glosses over most of their concerns over an earlier notification.
The IIT faculty will tomorrow submit a fresh charter of demands — consisting of earlier demands and scrapping the new recruitment rule — to the ministry.
“The revised pay notification is a sham. We want it amended and the new recruitment rule scrapped. It (the new rule) takes away the autonomy we enjoy while hiring faculty,” M. Thenmozhi, the president of the All India IIT Faculty Federation, said after the meeting.
The faculty of all the IITs demand that the ministry resolve the crisis within the next 10 days — by October 1. A fresh wave of protests is possible if the ministry does not meet this deadline, some senior teachers suggested.
“We want the minister to meet us along with the directors of all the IITs by October 1 to discuss our demands,” said Thenmozhi.
On September 24, the faculty at all the IITs will hold classes and pursue other academic responsibilities but will go on a hunger strike as a token of protest.
“We will observe a day’s hunger strike on Thursday across all the seven campuses…. Though we will be on strike, we will perform all our academic responsibilities,” Thenmozhi said.
The tussle over pay began after the ministry in a pay notification on April 18 snipped proposed new salaries for faculty at these institutions. Faculty at the IITs and the IIMs submitted detailed charters of demands to the ministry.
The demands included a hike in salaries of assistant professors, a raise for freshly joining faculty and a scholastic pay to compensate for their years spent pursuing education after their graduation instead of joining the workforce.
The faculty also demanded that a cap the ministry had placed on the number of professors eligible for a higher salary be removed.
The ministry in a revised pay notification on September 16 raised salaries for assistant professors but did not meet any of the other demands made by the IITs or the IIMs.
