BANGALORE: The faculty of IIT/IIM/IISc will have to deal with something that only their students have experienced until now— disappointment.
Reason: the final pay package for the faculty members as per the Sixth Pay Commission is not a patch on the Pay Review Committee’s (PRC) recommendations.
The document under circulation among IIT faculty members — available with the Express — shows that several of the recommendations made by the PRC have been either diluted or simply do not find mention.
The document that was prepared by an Inter-Ministerial Committee (IMC) to review PRC's recommendations, is believed to be the one approved by the Cabinet earlier this month, though this has not been verified. However, sources told Express that the IIT-Delhi Director met HRD Ministry officials on Tuesday and the final pay package was “mostly similar” to the IMC document.
The IIT faculty members will not take the package lying down, at least it seems so. IIT Madras Faculty Association president Prof M Thenmozhi said that the circulated document had ‘diluted’ the PRC report because their demand for higher wages had not been heeded to.
“Faculty pay at the IITs must be clearly higher than those under University Grants Commission (UGC) scale. However, in some cases, faculty under UGC pay scale will be getting more than those at IIT. For instance, assistant professors under UGC scale can move to a higher pay band (PB-3 to PB-4) after 10 years, whereas that option is not provided for IIT faculty members,” she said.
As if this is not enough, the IMC report has also raised the minimum experience required for some posts by a year. Besides recommending a lower Academic Grade Pay (AGP) for each post than recommended by the PRC committee, the IMC report is also silent on many recommendations such as the creation of the post of institute professor, startup research grant for faculty and appointment of outstanding engineers/technical experts to faculty positions.
Thenmozhi also pointed out that deputy registrars would be drawing salaries higher than several faculty members, as they come under the UGC scale.
The All India IIT Faculty Federation president Prof Sunil Pandey said that a course of action would be decided once the final document was made available publicly.
“The IIT faculty associations have conveyed that they will not accept the pay review based on the document under circulation,” he said.
Earlier this month, the IIT faculty members had protested against the non-implementation of the sixth pay review committee’s report. Around 3,000 faculty members across the Indian Institutes of Technology wore black badges at work to display their frustration at repeated delays in promised salary hikes. Maybe it’s time to repeat the act.
yusuf@epmltd.com
