industry

IITs to jointly look for foreign faculty


Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) have formed a united front to tackle a common problem: paucity of foreign faculty. A meeting of IIT directors and officials of the ministry of human resource development last month decided to streamline the faculty scouting process with a focused approach.

Each top institute has been allocated one or more geographical area where it will be responsible for the recruitment of global teaching talent—not just for itself, but for other IITs as well.

None of the 23 IITs currently have permanent faculty of foreign origin while a few have Indian-origin foreign faculty or adjunct foreign faculty.

The August 20 IIT Council meeting also proposed the setting up of aworking group of a few IITs to carry on the global faculty hunt. The human resources ministry, meanwhile, is in talks with the foreign ministry to help ease visa guidelines that restrict foreigners to work as faculty members on a permanent basis in India.

The main hunting ground for faculties is the US, which has been divided into three regions and allocated to IIT-Bombay (West Coast), IITDelhi (southern US) and IIT-Madras (East Coast), a person who was part of the council meeting said. IIT-Hyderabad will scout for teachers in Japan, IIT-Mandi in Scandinavia and IIT-Ropar in Canada.

“IITs, as it is, help each other. This plan to recruit faculty on behalf of others is still in a formative stage, but would definitely help all IITs in getting access to foreign faculty,” said Bhaskar Ramamurthy, director, IIT-Madras.

IIT-Ropar is the first to initiate steps on this front. Its director, Sarit Kumar Das, is going to hold walk-in interviews in Toronto on September 15. The institute is already spreading information about the recruitment drive through the Indian community in Canada.

IIT

“We are targeting Indians who want to return to India as well as other foreign faculty members,” said Das.

Foreign faculty would not only bring diversity at the IIT campuses, but also help them improve their global rankings, said Devang Khakhar, director, IIT-Bombay. “The foreign faculty recruitment coordination was discussed in the last meeting,” said Khakhar.

“The MHRD has probably kept in mind the track record of the IITs before assigning various regions to the IITs,” said Timothy Gonsalves, director, IIT-Mandi. The institute has tie-ups for student exchange, curriculum share and faculty with Scandinavian countries like Sweden, Norway and Denmark and hence has been assigned this region.

Visa for foreign-origin faculty has been an issue for the IITs. “But the government is trying to get rid of this hurdle and soon the visa restrictions would be lifted,” said Gonsalves.

“Though it is early to talk about how this route to recruit foreign faculty would be taken, but many IITs are keen on the US as it certainly has a large pool of teaching talent,” said V Ramgopal Rao, director, IITDelhi. However, some say the joint faculty selection will have its own challenges.

“Joint faculty selection is not possible. The faculty shortage is so acute that an IIT may recruit first for itself rather than on behalf of others,” said one IIT director, who did not wish to be named.





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