New Delhi: The Union government is said to have rejected the IITs’ request for exemption from implementing reservations in senior faculty posts, the Telegraph reported.
The report said the committee, headed by BJP parliamentarian Kirit P. Solanki, met with department of higher education officials on August 25. In that meeting, officials of the law ministry and the department of personnel and training were also present.
Last year, an eight-member committee, comprising IIT directors, appointed by the government for suggesting measures for ‘effective implementation’ of reservation in faculty recruitment in IITs had recommended that these institutions should be exempted from reservations under CEI Act, 2019. It had said that rather than specific quotas, diversity issues should be addressed through outreach campaigns and targeted recruitment of faculty.
Aiming to address the contentious issue of caste-based reservation in faculty hiring, the Union government in November 2019 had written to all IITs, IIMs and Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research to implement reservation in faculty hiring.
The committee suggestions made on June 17 were made available on December 16 after a Right to Information Act application was filed in Uttar Pradesh.
Also read: Reservation Is About Adequate Representation, Not Poverty Eradication
According to the Indian Express, the committee gave its suggestions to the Ministry of Education in two parts. Part A says that IITs should be added to the list of “institutions of excellence” mentioned in the Scheduled to the CEI Act 2019. Section 4 of this Act exempts “institutions of excellence, research institutions, institutions of national and strategic importance” mentioned in the Schedule and minority institutions from providing reservation.
It recommended that reservation should only be given at the level of assistant professor while associate professors and professors should be exempted – which was already the case as IITs had not been implementing reservation in its entirety.
In March 2021, geothermal energy researcher Dr Sachchida Nand Pandey filed a plea in Supreme Court contending that the process of admissions in research programmes and appointment of faculty members by all the IITs is “completely unconstitutional”. Despite the government extending reservation to all posts in all streams for faculty position, the IITs are completely violating the reservation policy, the plea claimed.
The Print had reported in February 2019 on the diversity deficit in these higher educational institutions saying that across 23 IITs, including new and old, only 9% of the current faculty are either SCs, STs or OBCs.