New Delhi: If 32-year-old Shouri Chatterjee were not teaching at the elite Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, one of the 13 such schools in the country, he may have been making millions at a US company, may be Halliburton Co., the world’s second biggest oil-field services firm.
In 2000, the Indian arm of the Houston-based company did offer him a job after he graduated from IIT Madras, but he declined the offer to enrol in a research programme at Columbia University. Several years later, he quit a million-dollar job with a US computer design firm to return to India to teach at IIT Delhi.
Attracting talent: (clockwise, from top) IIT Delhi Faculty Association chairman S.S. Murthy in a laboratory at the institute’s campus; assistant professor Shouri Chatterjee; and the campus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Ramesh Pathania / Mint
“Many of my friends perhaps would not do that today,” Chatterjee said on 24 September, as he prepared to teach a class. He hadn’t eaten that day; around 3,000 IIT professors had decided on a novel “classes on an empty stomach” protest against a recent government order on hiring policies at the IITs.
The protest has since been addressed, with the Union ministry of human resource development (HRD), which oversees the functioning of the IITs, and the faculty reaching a compromise of sorts. The ministry said the rules they opposed were only policy guidelines that weren’t cast in stone, and the professors agreed to call off their protest.
Still, the faculty campaign has served to highlight basic issues related to teaching at the IITs: the poor salaries that instructors are paid, almost as if teaching at an IIT involved a trade-off between handling a class of India’s best and brightest and getting paid well for doing so; and the ability to attract young teachers such as Chatterjee.
The government’s proposal to introduce contractual teaching jobs at the entry level in the IITs and restrict the appointment of fresh PhDs to the faculty are other issues.
Three years ago, when Chatterjee joined IIT Delhi after a brief stint at a Silicon Valley chip design firm he had signed up with after his PhD, the IITs were aggressively looking for young teachers.
Now, as then, the schools need to urgently find young teachers. And the policy that has now been recast as a guideline—it is only when they start hiring that the IITs will find out just how much the government is going to insist on guiding them—compromises their ability to do that, said Chatterjee.
That’s because while the hiring policy at the time Chatterjee was recruited envisaged taking on these young PhDs at level III (in terms of pays and perks), the new guideline says they will be hired on contract and move to level III after three years.
In contrast, Chatterjee, who was hired on level III, was moved to level IV recently. That would mean a salary of between Rs37,400 and Rs67,000 a month.