NEW DELHI: The Union Human Resources Development Ministry has decided to ask Ministries of Home and External Affairs to allow foreigners permanent jobs as teachers in the Indian Institutes of Technology.
The premier engineering colleges are finding it difficult to recruit foreigners as the five-year contract they offer as per norms at present are not attractive. HRD secretary (higher education) R Subrahmanyam said that in the IIT Council meeting on Monday-chaired by HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar-several institutes raised the issue that rules should be eased for foreigners to take up teaching in top engineering institutes.
"We will soon write to the MHA and MEA on this," Subrahmanyam said. It was also decided in the Council meeting all 23 IITs will create a pan-IIT faculty pool of foreign faculty members and best PhD scholars in each institute who can teach across all institutes.
"The IITs will start collective efforts to canvass for bright scholars in top Universities-including NRIs-- who are willing to join these institutes but the offers should be lucrative and make them want to go for them," said an IIT director.
"Foreign faculties are important not only from the faculty-shortage point of view but also to improvise our global rankings." IITs, like many other centrally funded technical institutes, have been struggling with the issue of faculty shortage for a long time. Vacancy in some IITs are as high as more than 50 per cent, officials in the HRD Ministry said.
Steps to tackle the faculty shortage in IITs was discussed in the meeting of IITs with President earlier this year, the Visitor of these institutes. A parliamentary panel on Ministry of Human Resource Development, in a report submitted in Parliament in November 2016, had said among the older IITs, Bombay had a vacancy of 38.66 per cent ; Kharagpur 42.42 per cent; Roorkee 41.88 per cent; Delhi 33.11 per cent ; Guwahati 26.50 per cent and IIT-BHU 53 per cent.
The selection of IITs at Delhi and Bombay as Institutes of Excellence allows them to hire foreign faculty up to 30 per cent of the total strength.