At top IITs, large numbers of reserved faculty posts vacant

Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) are facing a major gap in hiring faculty from the Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST) and Other Backward Classes (OBC) category. This also highlights that there is a gap in availability of the professional counsellor in the IITs.

According to reporter Sheena Sachdeva, from Careers360, out of the six IITs, IIT Roorkee, IIT (BHU), IIT Jodhpur, IIT Patna, IIT Ropar, and IIT Tirupati, IIT Kharagpur has the highest percentage of open reserved faculty positions, which is more than 90%. 

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Vacancies for reserved faculty

According to reporter Sheena Sachdeva’s report, IIT Kharagpur has 710 vacant faculty posts for the reserved category candidates. IIT Roorkee and IIT(BHU) reported a huge vacancy in these categories with 239 and 201 respectively.

Pranav Jeevan P, an alumnus of IIT Bombay, IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur told reporter Sheena, regarding the vacant faculty positions in the IITs, “the indicative expected number of posts for each category was computed by applying the reservation percentages of OBC 27%, SC 15%, and ST 7.5% to the total sanctioned strength”.

The National Task Force appointed by the Supreme Court, in its interim report, had suggested that the vacant faculty positions be filled “within three months giving priority to posts reserved for candidates from marginalised and under-represented communities”. It also suggested special recruitment drives for reserved posts. These findings highlight the importance of IITs in addressing recruitment shortages and focusing on hiring from reserved categories.