IIT Bomaby joins the nationwide faculty fast on Sep 24

Fearing a move by the Ministry of Human Resource Development to push IITs to the University Grants Commission (UGC) category, IIT Mumbai will join other faculty members across the country for a day-long fast.

Fearing a move by the Ministry of Human Resource Development to push IITs to the University Grants Commission (UGC) category, IIT Mumbai will join other faculty members across the country for a day-long fast.

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The strike is to protest against the recent notifications of the Ministry, especially on the 40 per cent cap on the promotion of professors among other discrepancies.

"We are very much concerned on the notification of the MHRD on the 40 per cent cap on promotions of professors as it will be detrimental to the growth of IITs which so far was based purely on merit," Secretary, Faculty Forum of IIT Bombay Prof S Mukherjee told PTI.

"This is definitely detrimental to the IIT system which has been evolved over a period of 50 years. This really hurts the core of IITs," Mukherjee said.

"We are also against the recruitment issue as this was also based on merit and by putting restrictions of 10 per cent recruitment to be placed only on the lower cadre is going to have negative effect on the standards of IIT," he said.

This kind of promotion and recruitment policies currently applied for University Grants Commission were proved to be unsuccessful and "we want to emphasise that merit should be the only criteria and IITs should have freedom to choose talents from any corner of the world and that is the practice of all the centres of excellence around the globe," he said.