Last year, over 400 students from IIT-Bombay were placed in the first four days of campus placements and 860 students were recruited last year from IIT-Madras. These numbers do not camouflage the problems faced by India’s premier technical institutions. The IITs have a faculty crunch of 30 per cent and need at least 2,500 teachers urgently to catch up with the standard student-teacher ratio of 10:1. This has been attributed to the addition of 54 per cent seats to accommodate more students in the OBC quota in the past few years. IIT-Delhi alone has 416 faculty members against the required 800. K Ramamurthy, dean-academic courses, IIT-Madras, explains, “The present situation cannot be termed as faculty crunch, though there is undeniably an extra teaching load on the faculty for an intervening period of four to five years. The present student-faculty strength may be around 13 to 14:1 as against the ideal sanctioned strength of 10:1. Traditionally, the IITs have had a ratio of 11 or 12:1.”
He says that the student-faculty ratio is worked out not just based on BTech/MTech, MSc or MBA students’ strength. “Apart from taking care of teaching requirements at UG and PG level, IIT faculty are spending their significant time towards guiding the MS and PhD research scholars, undertake sponsored research projects, publish papers and books, file patents, conduct continuing education programmes for college faculty and support industry requirements through consultancy assignments,” says Ramamurthy. The number of permanent faculty members at IIT-Madras is around 490, while the visiting or guest faculty comprises 30 members. “We plan to recruit 200 more faculty members over the next four years, which will work out to 160 additions net of retirements. We have recruited on an average 30 faculty members per year over the last 10 years,” reveals Ramamurthy. Facilities and labs also need to support the research activities of the new faculty, thus the delay in recruiting new members, opines Ramamurthy. This sentiment is echoed by other IIT members as well.
Dearth in the required number of faculty might not have had much pressure on placements this year, but students say, we need to concentrate on getting trained faculty. “Placements do not necessarily get affected by a faculty crunch, but there are other issues to look out for,” says Vandana Sinha, general secretary, Academic Affairs, IIT-Bombay. She explains that many of the BTech, MTech, MSc and PhD students share one subject and have to be taught together. “Although our professors are competent, individual attention is a problem,” she opines.
Sinha adds that even though new faculty has been recruited, teaching has not improved. “The older faculty is learned and experienced, but the new recruits need to first learn how to teach. Pedagogy will be an issue to them,” she says. While a welcome situation is yet to present itself, the solution as of now is to appoint one teacher to interact with a group of 10 to 15 students very closely ■
— deepshikha@newindianexpress.com