IIM Bill: Directors Predicts Difficulty In Filling Faculty Quota Seats

Owing to the IIM Bill yet to be presented to the cabinet, Indian Institute of Management or IIMs may soon have reserved faculty quota seats. This bill will allow the IIM chain of institutes to provide Degrees in place of Diplomas apart from creating the reserved quota for faculty hiring.

However, the directors of IIMs extend minimal support for the creation of faculty quota seats fearing degradation in the quality of education provided at IIMs. They also believe that filling-in these seats will be a difficult task.

One of the IIM directors is hoping that the government will only introduce the reserved category and not mandate it. This will enable general category candidates to be hired as faculty members in case of shortage of suitable candidates under reserved category. It will also help maintain the quality of faculty members recruited by the IIMs.

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Another IIM director said, “If we don’t compromise on quality on a certain level, it will be difficult to fill the reserved category”.

Although the IIMs do not have the exact data on the number of people doing the fellowship in the last five years, the directors believe that they will have to encourage more people to go for PhD in order to have good amount of candidates to choose from.

Director of IIM Ranchi, Anindya Sen suggests keeping a low percentage of reservation initially to “10% to 20%” and raising it later once more number of faculty have been hired under reserved category. She further adds that implementing everything at once may lead to difficulty in finding faculty without compromising on the quality.

One of the IIM directors also finds it okay if reservation is allowed in the beginning of a faculty’s career. But their career growth should be purely on economic conditions and merit.  

Few IIM directors plan on taking inputs from the reserved category faculty hiring system of the IITs as they have fixed criteria for faculty hiring.

However, lack of candidates under reserved categories meeting the criteria may be considered as one of the reasons for vacant faculty seats in the IITs.