New Delhi: The premier institutes of management and technology, the IITs and the IIMs, may go on a mass casual leave to protest Centre’s notification on their pay revision last

week, sources in the institutes said.

Till late Thursday evening, the representatives from the institutes were meeting officials from the Ministry of Human Resource Development that oversees education to sort out differences.

The revised annual increments approved by the Union Cabinet on 7 August for faculty at India’s apex technical education institutions are lower than those proposed by a central review panel, ministry sources told Mint.

The move has triggered protests from faculty associations at the institutes.

The pay regime approved by the cabinet ‘based on finetuning of the Goverdhan Mehta report by an inter-ministerial committee’ hikes starting salaries at each teaching post for the IITs and IIMs by around 150%. “The salaries were last set in 1999 and the hike is inadequate,” said a faculty member from IIM-Ahmedabad.

The new regime hits the National Institutes of Technology harder, which have for long sought pay parity with the IITs, IIITs and Indian School of Mines in Dhanbad, where teachers’ salaries are already higher than those of university teachers. NITs, according to the notification, will receive the pay prescribed by the University Grants Commission for varsity teachers.