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| | In a few months, India’s premier institutions including the IITs and IIMs will have to make space for thousands of more students due to last year’s OBC reservation law. The government has now finalised the blueprint to ensure that there are enough good teachers around to teach all of them. The Union Cabinet on Thursday will take the final call on the plan to raise retirement age of teachers at centrally funded institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian Institute of Management and the National Institutes of Technology to 65. Sources said there was a provision to re-employ faculty members on their retirement at 65 for another five years till 70. The proposal to raise the faculty’s retirement age from the existing 62 years has already been vetted by a Group of Ministers. The rule would apply to all teaching positions in centrally funded institutions under the ministry of human resource development. The shortage of faculty was a key point raised against the 27 per cent OBC quota law that would necessitate increasing the intake of students by about 54 per cent over a three-year period. The government had decided to raise the intake capacity proportionately to ensure that OBC reservations did not reduce the absolute number of seats available to general category students. The problem was that this would require a proportionate increase in faculty strength that was already below sanctioned levels because good teachers were hard to come by. According to one estimate, these institutes are already short of faculty members by about 15-30 per cent. Email author: atikku@hindustantimes.com |
