Finally, the truth about the contours and extent of faculty shortages in the country’s 553 universities and 31,000 colleges is out. A task force appointed in September 2009 by the Union HRD ministry to examine ‘faculty shortage and design of performance appraisal system’, submitted its report on August 9.
The report makes the shocking revelation that 383,868 faculty positions (equal to 54 percent of sanctioned posts) are vacant countrywide. This estimate is based on data obtained by the task force during and after consulting with several vice chancellors of universities, representatives of higher education regulatory bodies, students and faculty across the country. The faculty vacancies were calculated on the basis of a “realistic” 1:20.9 teacher-student ratio despite the University Grants Commission’s recommended 1:13.5 teacher-student ratio in tertiary education institutions.
The high powered task force was headed by IIT-Kanpur director, Prof. S.K. Dhande and included Prof. Devi Singh, director of IIM-Lucknow; Prof. Chiranjiv Sen of IIM-Bangalore; Prof. V. Kannan, vice chancellor of Hyderabad University; Prof. K.K. Agarwal, former vice chan-cellor of Indraprastha University and R.K. Chavan, secretary of UGC, as members. Moreover even more alarmingly, it estimated the nationwide faculty shortage during the next decade at 100,000 per year on the basis of an annual 6 percent growth in student enrolment.
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To confront this looming crisis, the expert group has made several recommendations. The most prominent is induction of young postgraduate students as teachers while they are still studying. “This is an idea, details of which have to be worked out by the HRD ministry. Essentially, the propo-sition is that students, who want a career in teaching, will be incentivised by offers of stipends to the extent of 95 percent of normative salaries while teaching until they complete their doctorates. They will also have to attend in-service teacher training modules, so that when fully qualified, they will be good teachers as well. Completion of the training programme could also earn them a separate diploma,” explains Prof. K.K. Agarwal.
Another significant and potentially controversial recommendation of the task force is to abolish the current practice of colleges/universities engaging guest faculty and contract teachers. According to Agarwal, the task force received conclusive evidence that a large number of private institutions introduce study programmes without recruiting faculty, relying on guest and contractual lecturers. “There has to be a mechanism for this. There is a large number of qualified professionals waiting to switch tracks to enter academia. But the question is: Will they be good teachers? An induction system has to be introduced,” says Agarwal.
Notwithstanding the government’s forward movement on the hitherto fudged issue of massive teacher shortages in higher education, while refusing to comment on the task force’s report, the newly elected president of Delhi University Teachers’ Association (DUTA), Prof. Amar Deo Sharma, is less sanguine about promising postgrad students or professionals entering Indian academia. “They (Union HRD ministry) have taken away the respect of teachers and hurt their self-esteem over the years, particularly in the past two years. Today the teacher is consi-dered a mere worker, who is given a curriculum, content and syllabus to follow, with freedom to innovate and improvise severely curtailed. It’s all very well to talk about faculty shortages but in Delhi University not even one vacancy has been filled despite a faculty deficit of 1,000 teachers, introduction of the semester system and additional OBC (other backward classes/caste) quota which means increased workload for faculty,” laments Sharma, who dismisses attainment of a GER (gross enrolment ratio) of 20 percent (cf. 11 percent currently) by 2015 in higher education as sheer fantasy.
Unfortunately with several Bills of the Union HRD ministry — the NCHER, Foreign Education Institutions and NCTE (National Council for Teacher Education) — pending enactment by Parliament which is experiencing a legislative log jam, the high-powered task force’s report and recommendations are likely to be consigned to the deep freeze for quite some time.
Autar Nehru (Delhi)