Professor quota red face for Centre

Telegraph C.S.Kasturi 11.11.08

New Delhi, Nov. 10: Less than one percent of India’s central university professors are from the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes, the latest government data show. The figure is just 10 percent for teachers of all designations at these universities, implying more than half the faculty posts reserved for SC/STs on these campuses are vacant. This despite a “special recruitment drive¶ launched by the Centre four years ago to fill vacant quota seats. The revelations cast a cloud over the government’s implementation of job quotas in education. All central universities — like other government institutions — are required to reserve 15 percent posts for the SCs and another 7.5 percent for the STs. But only 6.7 percent of teachers at India’s central universities are SCs, and a mere 3.5 percent are STs, according to the data collected by the human resource development (HRD) ministry from individual universities. The data relate to 20 of India’s 23 central universities. The other three are Aligarh Muslim University, which is locked in a legal battle for minority status that exempts it from quotas, Sikkim University which started this year, and the Indira Gandhi National Open University. “These figures are extremely embarrassing for us at the HRD ministry, since Parliament is certain to ask why, even after a special drive, the vacancies exceed recruitments,¶ a senior ministry official said. The ministry today raised its concerns over the vacancies at a conference with the vice-chancellors of central universities and the directors of institutions like the IITs and the IIMs.

In July 2004, soon after coming to power, the United Progressive Alliance government had announced the special recruitment drive to fill vacant seats reserved for SC/ST candidates. Surveys had shown that the lack of teachers applied across caste and community — there were many vacant general category seats as well. But the SC/STs were a minuscule fraction even among those recruited. The drive was seen as an acknowledgement by the government that greater effort was needed to attract SC/ST candidates to teaching so that the vacant seats could be filled. The new data, collected four years after the drive and in the run-up to a slew of Assembly elections, however, suggest that the drive may have failed. In all, the 20 universities covered in the data have 6,315 teachers in varsity departments (that is, not including teachers at individual colleges of universities like Delhi University). According to the reservation policy, at least 947 of these posts (15 percent) should be occupied by SCs and 474 (7.5 percent) by STs.

The data collected by the HRD ministry, however, show that only 424 of the teachers are SCs and 221 are STs, suggesting that 523 SC and 253 ST seats are vacant. But the data also reveal a skew in the nature of the reserved jobs that are vacant. India’s central universities do meet their quota obligations when it comes to the post of lecturer, the entry-level post in varsities. But higher up in the faculty hierarchy, SC and ST teachers become increasingly rare. Less than two percent of readers at central universities are SCs, and STs fare no better, the data show. In the 20 central universities, only 12 professors are SCs, while the number is 22 for STs. Together, they make up less than one percent of the total number of professors at India’s central universities.

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*Northeastern Hill University