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Supreme Court seeks Centre, IITs reply over plea on quota for faculty recruitment
A bench of justices L Nageswara Rao, BR Gavai and BV Nagarathna asked the petitioner’s lawyer to examine the issue based on the 2019 law passed by Parliament, which provides for reservation for SC, ST and OBC in teacher cadre in central educational institutions, IITs being one among them.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday sought a response from the Centre and all Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) on a plea over inadequate reservation for faculty members and research degree programmes.
The petition, filed by geothermal energy researcher Sachichida Nand Pandey, claimed that the representation of scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and other backward classes was way below the prescribed percentage of 15%, 7.5% and 27% respectively.
A bench of justices L Nageswara Rao, BR Gavai and BV Nagarathna asked the petitioner’s lawyer to examine the issue based on the 2019 law passed by Parliament, which provides for reservation for SC, ST and OBC in teacher cadre in central educational institutions, IITs being one among them.
Advocate Ashwani Kumar Dubey, appearing for the petitioner, urged for a mechanism to be put in place for resolving complaints by students/scholars alleging harassment and to have a committee of technical experts to review the performance of the existing faculty, besides adopting a transparent recruitment policy.
The bench agreed to consider only one prayer asking the IITs to follow the reservation policy in admission in research degree programmes and recruitment of faculty at the institute.
As per data collected by the petitioner, out of 3,581 faculty posts in 11 leading IITs, the faculty strength belonging to SCs was 68, STs was 10 and OBCs 194. “The respondents are not following the guidelines of reservation as per the constitutional mandate,” the petition said.
In June 2008, a letter was addressed by the ministry of education to the Directors of IITs at Kharagpur, Madras, Bombay, Roorkee and Guwahati asking them to implement reservation for SC, ST and OBCs in teaching posts at the assistant professor level in science and technology and all levels in humanities and management department.
In November 2019, the petition added, the Centre extended reservation to all posts (associate professors and professors) in all streams, including technical or faculty positions. Quoting news reports, the petition said that between 2015 and 2019, IITs admitted 2.1% STs, 9.1% SCs and 23.2% OBCs as research scholars.
The petition also raised the rising suicides cases among students in IITs and linked the issue to the poor quality of teaching, supervision, caste and racial harassment that students have to undergo at these institutions. It pointed out that faculty members belonging to north, central and Hindi speaking states are low in the IITs which is an added factor of discrimination in the recruitment policy adopted.
