Madurai MP Su. Venkatesan has raised concerns over the Ministry of Education’s instructions to all Central Educational Institutions (CEIs) to fill all faculty vacancies in reserved categories in a “mission mode” by pointing out that the measure had been half-hearted.
In a letter submitted to Union Minister of Education Dharmendra Pradhan, he said the Ministry had not taken concrete measures to resolve issues related to implementation of reservation in a majority of the CEIs, including the IITs, IIMs and the NITs, as they followed a flexible cadre structure.
Following concerns from various quarters on the poor representation of people from Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and Other Backward Class communities in the CEIs, the Ministry issued instructions in August to all the institutions asking them to fill the vacancies, especially in SC/ST/OBC and Economically Weaker Section categories, in a mission mode between September 2021 and September 2022.
In flexible cadre structure, the faculty strength in an institution was fixed as a whole without cadre-wise split on the number of Assistant Professors, Associate Professors and Professors. A number of CEIs had approached the Ministry, seeking clarification on the implementation of Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Teachers’ Cadre) Act of 2019.
In the reply to a question raised by Mr. Venkatesan recently in the Lok Sabha, the Ministry said that no CEI had expressed inability to prepare reservation rosters for the vacancies which, he said, was essential to fill them. However, he said, the replies received separately through the Right to Information Act from six CEIs, which included four IITs and two NITs, showed that they were unable to prepare the rosters.
In reply to the same question, he said the Ministry also failed to provide community-wise vacancies available in the CEIs and instead only said 13,701 posts were lying vacant.
Moreover, Mr. Venkatesan furnished a list of 130 job advertisements issued by the CEIs recently, of which only less than 20 had advertised the total number of vacancies and community-wise number of vacancies available. He urged the Ministry to ensure that all the CEIs uploaded cadre-wise and community-wise vacancies available on their websites.
“If the aim of the ongoing mission mode recruitment is really to ensure adequate representation of the SC/ST/OBC categories according to the CEI Act-2019, then special recruitment should compulsorily be conducted on the basis of reservation roster of each cadre of teaching posts,” he said in his letter to the Minister.
