India is staring at a mammoth faculty vacancy in its elite higher education institutions, the latest official data has revealed.

India is staring at a mammoth faculty vacancy in its elite higher education institutions, the latest official data has revealed.

Faculty vacancy in the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) was 40 per cent as of July this year, most acute in Varanasi, Roorkee (above 50 per cent), Kharagur and Delhi. Vacancies were highest for OBC faculty.

In the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), faculty vacancies stood at over 20 per cent, highest in Indore (52 per cent) and Ranchi (48 per cent).

“Yes, vacancies exist and aren’t desirable, and we are dealing with it,” Indranil Manna, Director of IIT Kanpur, told The Hindu. “It’s a long process and we don’t want any compromises with quality,” he said. In certain disciplines, the pool of qualified persons from whom to hire was simply not large enough, he added.

Forty per cent of the faculty positions in the 39 Central universities across the country are also vacant, the situation being more acute in the newer central universities. Over half of all faculty positions in Delhi University are vacant, and over 80 per cent of all professor, associate professor and assistant professor positions in the new Central university of Tamil Nadu are vacant.

The new numbers were submitted to the Rajya Sabha by Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani on Monday, in response to a question by Avinash Khanna, BJP MP from Punjab.

Contract, adjunct and visiting faculty as well as “using the online mode of teaching” were being pressed in to overcome these shortages, she said. The age of superannuation had been raised and faculty were being encouraged to undertake consultancy.