BHUBANESWAR: The Higher Education department will from now on monitor the attendance of faculty members in colleges and universities. The move is aimed at ensuring that the faculty members follow the seven-hour duty, as mandated by the department since 2019. A decision on this has been taken at a review meeting on implementation of the 5T charter pertaining to the department recently which was chaired by the commissioner-cum-secretary Aravind Agarwal.
Accordingly, every month the performance tracking cell (PTC) of the Higher Education department will collect reports from colleges and universities on whether all the faculty members have clocked the seven-hour attendance or not. The move comes in the wake of allegations against faculty members of several institutions of not spending seven hours on campuses for academic work.
These accusations were made during an opinion-seeking exercise conducted by the department. In August this year, the department had directed students of the state’s public colleges and universities to highlight all shortcomings in their institutions, in terms of academics, placements or infrastructure, via a Google form which was put up on its social media handles.
Students had alleged that many of the faculty members are not spending seven hours on campus and some even come to work in an intoxicated state. The names of faculty who were accused of doing so were also disclosed by the students in the feedback forms.
The universities in question are Rajendra University, Gangadhar Meher University, Utkal University, Ravenshaw University, Kalahandi University, Maharaja Sriram Chandra Bhanja Deo University, and Sambalpur University. Officials of the department said action will be taken against the teachers violating the attendance norm.