Departmentalising Reservations in Teacher Recruitment
iasparliament
March 12, 2018
What is the issue?
University Grants Commission (UGC) has recently decided to implement reservation for teaching positions by treating ‘individual departments’ as units.
This is socially regressive as this approach is expected to substantially reduce the number of SC, ST and OBC intake.
How did the decision evolve?
UGC has recently decided to implement reservation “department wise” instead of considering the university as a whole.
Union HRD ministry has approved UGC’s decision and has claimed that the new intake formula was based on the directives of the Allahabad High court.
But it has been contested by some, who claim that this would reduce the number of SC, ST and OBC candidate intake substantially.
Notably, despite the tardy implementation, reservations in education and jobs are the ones that have proven effective in uplifting the depressed classes.
Also, it is a reality that if reservations are absent, even eligible candidates from these groups would be discriminated against on castist grounds.
What is the category-wise breakdown of teaching staff?
As per the UGC’s annual report for 2016-17, there were a total of 14.7 lakh teachers in colleges (89%) and university departments (9%).
The report gives the category-wise teaching positions of SCs, STs and the OBCs in the 30 central and 82 state public universities.
Of the total 31,446 teaching positions in these universities that are currently filled, the combined total of SCs, STs and OBCs were 9,130.
This is merely 29.03% of the positions as against their combined reservation of 49.5% that is granted to these groups in the central list.
More importantly, of the 9,130 people - 7,308 (80%) were assistant professors, 1,193 (13%) associate professors and barely 629 (7%) were of professors.
While these figures are only for universities and category wise break-up for colleges has not been given, the trend can’t be very different there either.
The Rajeev Gandhi National Fellowship, which was implemented in 2005, saw the grant of 2000 fellowship annually to SCs and STs doing MPhil and PhDs.
While at least 15,000 such fellows would’ve successfully graduated, the current recruitment scenario for universities gives them little hope for securing a job.
What are the issues with the new policy?
If vacancies are this high when universities are treated as a whole, then departmentalisation of reservations would only exacerbate this.
Further, departmentalisation would mean more impediments for the reserved in promotions, and consequently curtail career progression.
Hence, the new rules for departmental reservation are only going to worsen this situation, which hence needs immediate correction.
Also, Privatisation in education is reducing the share of the reserved staffers as there is lesser compliance with reservation policies in private institutions.
