Earlier this week, the Modi government instructed all central educational institutions, comprising IITs and IIMs to comply with quota rule in faculty hiring. This directive issued by the human resource development (HRD) ministry has come days after a parliamentary panel questioned it over the poor implementation of reservation policy in faculty recruitment.
As per the constitutional provisions, all central universities in the country are mandated to implement the faculty quota- 15% reservation for Scheduled Castes (SC), 7.5% for Scheduled Tribes (ST) and 27% for Other Backward Castes (OBCs). Where all central universities do so, IITs and IIMs mostly do not provide this reservation in its entirety, as per government data.
Where the IITs enforce reservation in teacher appointment only at the entry level- assistant professors, 96% of the faculty at the IIMs are from the general category. The HRD ministry's department of higher education in its official order issued on Wednesday said that the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Teachers' Cadre) Act was notified on July 9 this year to give reservation in teaching positions. Following this, the HRD ministry also issued a notification saying that any further hiring will be required to be done as per the listing prepared.
With this new order, all the institutions will now have to provide reservations in senior faculty positions (professors and associate professors) as well. The rule will be applicable to IISERs and the central government institutes in the field of research. The HRD ministry had recently written to all government institutions to fully implement the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Teachers' Cadre) Act. The ministry had also sent a separate communication to all IIMs to ensure 'reservation of posts in direct recruitment' considering the institution as one unit- as stated in the Act that came into effect on March 7, 2019.
