College rules may change to attract better profs

To attract the best brains to higher education in India, the University Grants Commission, the regulator, proposes to allow lateral entry into college faculties, at higher salaries. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Jul 24, 2009, 24:29:00 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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To attract the best brains to higher education in India, the University Grants Commission, the regulator, proposes to allow lateral entry into college faculties, at higher salaries. A university or a college will be allowed to hire someone at a senior position straight away without coming up — as the present rule mandates — through the preceding ranks of Lecturer and Reader.

These inductees can be professionals from the corporate world or senior academics from foreign universities. They will be paid 15 or 20 per cent more than others of the same rank.

This is just a plan at the moment. UGC chairperson SK Thorat said it will be launched only after it is cleared at a commission meeting on August 3.

Welcoming the move, Deepak Pental, Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University, said, “Its success will depend on enough resources provided for inducting them.”

The idea has been inspired by a Brain Gain scheme launched by China in 2006, under which over 3,000 Chinese-origin academicians, professionals and corporate executives returned home to teach.

There are precedents even here. Some state and Deemed Universities have been hiring abroad to strengthen their faculties, at salaries most college teachers can only dream about.

Thorat has no plans of matching these salaries. The maximum on offer is Rs 9.60 lakh a year with a one-time contingency fund of Rs 1 lakh. And this is for the senior-most level — scholars-in-residence.

The commission plans to create 1218 such positions in its universities. It is setting aside Rs 75 crore a year for this scheme, for now.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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