NEW DELHI : The National Institutes of Technology have demanded pay parity with the faculty of the Indian Institutes of Technology under a proposed salary regime that will enable them to compete for top teachers.

NIT directors rejected a differential pay structure between their institutes and the IITs proposed by a central pay panel at a meeting with Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal last week, officials said.

The meeting was slated as a courtesy call on Sibal, HRD ministry sources said. “But it transformed into a forum for the directors to demand that their faculty are not ready to accept lower pay than the IITs,” an official said.

The demand follows recommendations of the pay panel for Central technical institutes, headed by former Indian Institute of Science director Goverdhan Mehta. It suggested continuing with the different pay structures.

The IITs have traditionally enjoyed better pay for their faculty than the NITs and other top Central engineering institutions, including four Indian Institutes of Information Technology.

But the NITs, which also hold the tag of “Institutes of National Importance” like the IITs, argue that the government must no longer discriminate between different institutions it funds.

“Jawaharlal Nehru University may have a better reputation than some other central varsities, but the same pay scales hold for all Central universities. There is no reason why the system should be different in technical education,” an NIT director said.

The NITs also argue that lower pay scales prevent them from competing with the IITs for top teachers, propelling them into a “vicious cycle” where they can never hope to catch up with the IITs in quality.

The NITs had asked for equal pay during discussions with the Mehta committee on the salary review, according to the panel’s report.

Panel members point out that their report has recommended a hike in pay for faculty of all institutes, including the NITs. “It is natural for people to differ in their opinions on our report, but we believe we have given teachers across all institutions a wonderful deal,” Mehta said.

Another member argued that the different faculty structures at the IITs and the NITs make it “impossible” for their pay structures to be common.

The IITs have a four-tier faculty structure, with lecturers at the bottom of the rung followed by assistant professors, associate professors and professors.

The NITs have a three-tier structure. The Mehta panel has recommended that entrants to the NITs be called assistant professors, with associate professors and professors above them.

The panel has recommended identical salaries for IIT lecturers and NIT assistant professors. It has suggested that NIT associate professors receive pay that falls in between the salaries of IIT assistant professors and associate professors.

Professors at the NITs are placed on a par with associate professors of the IITs, according to the suggested pay structure.  

Six more NITs to be opened in North East states

NEW DELHI : Six of the nine new National Institutes of Technology promised by the UPA government will be set up in the Northeast, one in each state which does not have a NIT at present.

The Human Resource Development Ministry had written to the chief ministers of Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim asking them to allocate land for the NITs, senior officials told reporters.

Assam and Tripura already have such institutes (in Silchar and Agartala).

The ministry had also written to the Puducherri, Goa and Uttarakhand administration where NITs will be set up, sources said.

The move follows controversial changes to the institutes’ admission policy last year which the northeastern states termed as "discriminatory against regions traditionally backward in technical education."

The NITs admit students on the basis of their performance in the All India Engineering Entrance Examination (AIEEE), a national-level test conducted by the CBSE.

Till last year, 50 per cent of the seats in the NITs were filled by domiciled candidates of the state in which the NIT is located. The states without NITs were also allocated reserved seats at other NITs, based on their population.

The rationale for the reservation was that most of the NITs were initially set up as Regional Engineering Colleges (RECs) aimed at developing technical education in specific states.

A key precondition placed by states for the transfer of these institutes to the Centre as NITs was the continuation of reservation for students belonging to the respective states.

Last year, the HRD Ministry changed the admission policy for the NITs. The move was considered controversial for two reasons:

The institutes are officially autonomous bodies and it is their apex decision making body, the NIT Council, and not the HRD Ministry, that is empowered to alter the admission process.

Secondly the new admission policy also ended state-specific reservations, stipulating that all seats would be filled up on the basis of a student’s merit determined by performance in the AIEEE.

The end of reservations at the NITs was discriminatory against relatively less developed states, chief ministers of the northeastern states had complained to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a Rajya Sabha MP from Assam.

They feared that students from their states would no longer find minimum proportional representation at the NITs.