IITs, NITs are facing a dearth of teachers as 6,000 posts lie empty

• As many as 6,000 teaching posts are vacant in India’s top engineering colleges — IITs and NITs.
  
• There are 2,813 job vacancies in IITs, while 3,211 in NIT campuses across the country.
  
• NIT campuses have 4,346 non- teaching job vacancies.

India’s elite engineering institutions including Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) and National Institute of Technology (NITs) are facing a shortage of teaching staff, the Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry revealed earlier this week.

As many as 6,000 teaching posts — 2,813 in the IITs and 3,211 in NITs — have been vacant across locations. Since, the institutions are autonomous bodies, the government has asked to run special recruitment drives to hire for these positions.

Despite nearly 8,856 positions allocated to teaching jobs in the 23 centres of Indian IITs, only 6,043 vacancies have been filled across the country. Over 2,800 posts have been vacant — including the jobs allocated for the reserved categories, Union Cabinet Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal told IANS.

Of the 2,813 teaching vacancies, 170 were reserved for Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST).

For NIT campuses, the institute sanctioned 7,413 faculty positions, of which, 3,211 haven't been filled yet. The remaining 4,202 teachers include 543 people employed from the reserved category, the Minister noted.

In fact, the institute has a dearth of non-teaching staff as well. According to the HRD Ministry, vacancies for jobs like administrative positions have not filled either. Of the 8,163 of these positions, 4,346 positions are vacant.

As on January 2019, India’s central universities — including IITs — have over a third of teaching vacancies, HRD Minister Prakash Javedekar told The Times of India while addressing a roundtable on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) opportunities.

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