Thursday, July 11, 2019

2 yrs on, TN varsities begin recruitment to fill vacancies

Ragu.Raman@timesgroup.com

Chennai:11.07.2019

After a two-year ban on recruitment, Tamil Nadu universities have begun their recruitment process to fill vacancies in their departments.

Bharathidasan University has issued advertisement to recruit 54 faculty in the first phase, on Wednesday. Other universities, including Anna University and Madras University, will soon initiate the process.

As per the University Grants Commission’s (UGC) instructions, Bharathidasan University has decided to follow the UGC guidelines for recruitment taking the institution as a unit for implementing the reservation. “We plan to recruit 54 faculty members based on requirement and priority. It will be done taking the institution as a unit instead of department as per the UGC’s direction. We will follow 200-point roster system to implement the reservation,” said P Manishankar, vice-chancellor of Bharathidasan University. The universities are also worried that huge vacancies would hurt their NAAC accreditation and funding from central agencies. “Though we have 80 vacancies we are filling the vacancies in departments which would get funds from the UGC’s special assistance programme (SAP) and department of science technology’s FIST programme,” he said. To get funds under SAP, a department needs to have a minimum of six faculty members. At present, there are more than 600 vacancies across state universities, while some have more than 40% of posts vacant due to the ban by the higher education department and the UGC in successive years.

To redeploy the excess faculty in Annamalai University, the higher education department banned recruitment in universities in 2017-18 and just when they were planning their recruitment, the UGC banned it last year asking the state and central universities to await the outcome of a case on implementing reservation in higher educational institutions.

Thetwo-year ban and retiring faculty members have reduced the strength in top universities. For example, Anna University has not recruited new faculty since 2014 for various reasons. The vacancies swelled to 230 by May.

“We have taken the approval of the syndicate for recruitment of new faculty members. We are preparing the roster system,” said M K Surappa, vice-chancellor of Anna University.

While the UGC said the institution should be taken as a unit for recruitment, the state universities, including Anna University, do not have clarity on conducting recruitment without the higher education department’s formal decision.

Madras University vicechancellor P Duraisamy said theuniversity wouldseekclarification from the higher education department on whether to consider the institution as a unit or department as a unit to implement reservation. “After getting approval from the state government, we will start the recruitment process,” he said. Higher education secretary Mangat Ram Sharma said the state government will send a formal letter to all universities on recruiting new faculty. “The state universities have so far not raised an issue in recruiting faculty members by taking the institution as a unit. We will decide on this after the formal announcement from the Centre,” he told TOI.

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