Faculty Crunch Hits New IITs!

New Delhi: Ever since the eight new IITs have come into existence, there have been apprehensions that they will bring down the overall value of the Brand IITs. Now, they are struggling with severe faculty crunch, poor infrastructure and mediocre placement records.

Most of the new IITs have failed o fill up their quota of faculty posts. IIT Jodhpur and IIT Mandi are at the lowest end of this spectrum. Out of the 90 posts, IIT Jodhpur has been able to appoint only 48 faculty members while IIT Mandi has only 49 faculty members to boast of. Many times PhD students take classes at IIT Jodhpur or an expert of one subject is forced to teach subjects they do now know much about.

IIT Bhubaneshwar, IIT Gandhinagar, IIT Indore, IIT Patna and IIT Ropar are facing similar problems. Only IIT Hyderabad has been able to fill up nearly all the 105 faculty posts allotted to it.

Remoteness of location is the main reason why it is difficult for new IITs to attract and retain talent. Poor infrastructure all around and lack of good schools for their children repel good quality teachers. Many of the new IITs are working out of temporary campuses without proper classrooms, labs, hostels, sports facilities and a library.

Gloomy placement record is another issue that plagues new IITs. Only IIT Gandhinagar and IIT Bhubaneshwar had been able to secure 91 and 92 per cent placements of their students respectively. Rest of the new IITs failed at breaking the 90 per cent placement barrier.

IIT Indore managed to place only 100 students out of 118 (about 85%). Many of the remaining students chose to go for higher studies.

Salary packages offered at new IITs are not very encouraging too. In fact, many of the National Institutes of Technology (NITs) seem to be doing better in this regard. Last year, NIT Trichy secured 96 per cent placements for its B.Tech students with the lowest annual packaged offered being Rs 4 lakh.

However, experts say that it took five decades for the old IITs to reach their current status. IIT Kharagpur, Chennai, Delhi, Kanpur and Mumbai started at a small level too. IIT Roorkee and IIT BHU have proved that given time, new IITs will catch up too.

According to the Business Standard, old IITs face shortage of 41% teaching staff too:

IITs hope to recover from the faculty crunch in the next five years. Until then, they are offering good stipends to attract PhD scholars who can serve as teaching assistants and are appointing adjunct and visiting faculty members.

This post was written by Aditya Singhal, managing director of askIITians.