In JNU, 120 reserved category teaching posts yet to be filled

Indian Express: New Delhi: Thursday, October 03, 2013.

In June this year, the vice-chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) had said “the university would try and meet its staff requirement in a month or two”.

Three months later, RTI documents provided by the university show that at least 120 of the total 780 teaching positions are still lying vacant. All of these vacancies are in the reserved category.

According to the document, 65 posts professors (21), associate professors (34) and assistant professors (10) reserved under the Scheduled Caste and 36 under the Scheduled Tribe category are vacant.

Four seats reserved for assistance professors in the OBC category and 19 for those from the physically handicapped category are also vacant.

Speaking to Newsline, Vice-Chancellor Sudhir Kumar Sopory said, “We have started filling these positions. We have also re-advertised for certain posts, because in several cases we do not get any applications.”

The VC said the vacancies increased after the university received extra teaching positions recently. “While we try and and add new faculty to our departments, there are others who retire or are about to retire. We also get guest faculty to take classes whenever possible,” Sopory said, adding that most of these vacancies would be filled by February 2014.

JNU has been facing a faculty shortage in various departments for over a year now.

Earlier this year, the university had reported a shortage of approximately 85 teachers across all schools and centres.

The shortage has been attributed to an increase in the university’s intake capacity, which has gone up 1.5 times after the OBC quota was implemented. As a result, the student strength has gone up from 5,500 to 7,800 in the last five years. According to the VC, at least 75 per cent of these had been filled by university by the end of August.

Earlier, the VC had said while the university received many applications for the posts of assistant professors, it was harder to find suitable candidates for professorship due to strict requirements in certain specialised areas. He said in some categories “there were no applications at all”.