Why faculty salaries need to be a priority – Times of India

In a recent tweet, former IIT Delhi director V Ramgopal Rao said faculty salaries in private universities is an issue that needs to be addressed in India. He highlighted that some of the faculty are not even being paid as per the 7th Pay Commission and hence want to migrate to government institutions. Fancy buildings and vast campuses cannot make for a good university and regulatory bodies and processes must enforce measures to address the inequity, said Rao.

A senior academician on condition of anonymity holds a similar view. “A number of PhDs from the IITs and IISc who have joined the private sector, lament that they are not being paid the basic minimum salary and are seeking government college jobs in any part of the country. For example, a BTech or PhD from an old IIT could be earning a salary of around Rs 50,000 even after a couple of years of postdoc experience. It is not as if the institutions are not making money and some of them have been identified as Institutions of Eminence (IoEs), but despite their plush campuses, do not feel that faculty salaries are a gainful expenditure,” he says.

While many institutions recruit retired IIT academics, who are paid very well, it is not the same for the faculty who regularly teach in the classrooms. “These faculty may find it challenging to get government jobs which is a time-consuming process and there could be reservation issues as well. However, it is not as if all private institutions are poor pay masters,” he emphasises.
Souvik Bhattacharyya, vice-chancellor, BITS Pilani, corroborates, “There are non-government universities where faculty salaries are either at par with that in the IITs/7th pay Commission scales or even higher than that. BITS Pilani is one such example where the salaries are mapped identically to 7th Pay Commission/IIT pay scales. As a matter of fact, in the IITs, the salary saturates at the end of the scale for professor and professor (HAG) cadres; in case of BITS Pilani, they continue to fetch annual increments and hence salary gets higher than the corresponding IIT gross pay for those levels.”

“Although we do not receive the annual government grants that the IITs/CFTIs enjoy, we do our best to ensure quality in every function of the university. We closely track the Institutional Knowledge Analytics to assess our performance periodically. We have a formal unit (IKA Cell) to oversee this process. Key performance indicators are monitored along with the data leading to actionable insights to enhance performance.”

Salary discrepancies, he says, may exist everywhere, since there are some state government universities where the salaries are relatively lower because of the lower dearness allowance (DA) paid by the particular state government. “Today, the quality of an academic institute should not be assessed based on its ownership (government/private). It goes without saying that appropriate salaries will attract the better human resource; hence it is essential that we pay our faculty members well, and benchmark it against the very best in the country,” he adds.

Sriman Kumar Bhattacharyya, vice-chancellor, Shiv Nadar University Chennai, says, “In HEIs, the young minds are groomed to produce quality manpower in different disciplines, and this massive undertaking can be accomplished only if the institutions have quality faculty members with appropriate pay packages and career growth opportunities. Keeping this in mind, we provide faculty with salaries as per the 7th pay commission guidelines as well as additional allowances/grants for R&D.”

Though remuneration is an important aspect for faculty members, this cannot be the only factor impacting the quality of education, says Jitu Mishra, chief administrative officer and senior director HR at OP Jindal Global University (JGU). “JGU’s policies such as research grant, publication incentives facilitate the faculty members to work on their intellectual growth and the institution-building.”

Today’s generation prefers AC classrooms rather than classrooms with broken desks and non-functional fans. “We provide world-class infrastructure without compromising on the quality of the faculty members whose salaries are in line with the UGC recommendations,” Mishra says.