200 IIT-B profs take leave,march for higher pay hike

Over 200 professors of IIT-Bombay held a silent march on the Powai campus on Monday,demanding a further revision of the pay scales recently approved by the Human Resource Development Ministry....

Over 200 professors of IIT-Bombay held a silent march on the Powai campus on Monday,demanding a further revision of the pay scales recently approved by the Human Resource Development Ministry.

Many classes were suspended as professors went on a one-day mass casual leave. They are unhappy with the Professor Govardhan Mehta Committee recommendations for centrally funded institutions like IITs and IIMs. We are compared with universities like MIT and Harvard. While the fourth and the fifth pay commissions put entry level assistant professors on a par with readers of universities,the sixth brings comparative reduction in status as well as money, said Professor Soumyo Mukherji,secretary,IIT-Bombay Faculty Forum.

IIT-Madras had observed a strike on Friday. IIT-Delhi will protest on Tuesday,followed by IIT-Roorkee and other IITs.

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On Sunday,directors of all IITs met at IIT-M and forwarded a memorandum to the HRD Ministry.

A Ministry notice had decided pay scales of Rs 15,600- 39,100 for lecturers or lecturer-cum-post-doctoral fellow,Rs 30,000 (minimum fixed) for assistant

professors,Rs 37,400-67,000,Rs 42,800 (minimum fixed) for associate professors and Rs 37,400-67,000,Rs 48,000 (minimum fixed) for professors.

The professors are also demanding scholastic pay. If you compare the difference between the stipend of a PhD student and the working salary in a government science lab over,say,six years,the loss is Rs 23 lakh. Our demand of scholastic pay in monthly installments of Rs 15,000 has been overlooked though the committee had taken inputs from IIT Faculty Forum Federations and IIT directors, Mukherji said.

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They are also unhappy with the clause making it mandatory for assistant professors to have three years work experience after getting PhDs. Are students who work for three years after getting a PhD likely to join academia? Isnt it better to catch them just after they get PhDs? Now,with private and foreign universities setting up campuses in India,there is a fear of losing bright people to them as they will offer higher salaries, said Professor Bharat Seth,forum president.

The deadline for meeting our demands is September 4 after which there is talk of going on a fast on September 5. A delegation of professors two from each IIT will go to Delhi on Teachers Day, said Mukherji.