At a time when many teaching departments of the University of Kerala were grappling with shortage of permanent faculty members, the hardest hit of the lot appear to be the Indian and foreign language departments of the varsity.
While at one department – German – there have been no permanent teachers at all for the past two years, another department – Russian – is making do with just one permanent teacher.
While the German department has a sanctioned strength of four faculty members, the Russian department needs three more permanent teachers to fill its sanctioned strength. At the Department of Hindi there is a shortage of three permanent teachers, at the Sanskrit department, five posts are lying vacant.
Contract lecturers
At all these departments the day-to-day running of courses is being undertaken using contract lecturers. However, it is on the MPhil and research fronts and in fund generation that these departments find the going tough. For instance, these departments find it almost impossible to apply for assistance from, say, the University Grants Commission, because they don’t have the minimum required number of teachers. To apply for funds under the Special Assistance Programme of the UGC, a department needs to have at least six faculty members.
At the Department of Hindi, where two years ago the number of seats for the MA programme was raised from 10 to 20 due to demand, the shortage of permanent teachers means that the department finds it tough to apply for scholars under the UGC’s Post Doctoral Fellowship programme. Associate professor and head of the department R. Jayachandran pointed out that the shortage of permanent teachers was also affecting the intake of research scholars.
“If we had the full complement of teachers we could have taken in 40 research scholars. Now, we can take in only 16.” Also, contract lecturers cannot be involved in any policy-making initiative of the department. They cannot even be designated as internal examiners, he added.
According to the head of the Russian Department, R.S. Krishnakumar, who also officiates as head of the Department of German, there is a renewed demand for persons proficient in Russian, mainly in the medical tourism sector, at the Kudankulam nuclear power plant and at the BrahMos facility in Thiruvananthapuram.
