The IIEST teachers’ association has written to the chairman of the institute’s board of governors alleging “mishandling” of the ongoing faculty recruitment process.
Association members said they decided to write the letter after a meeting of the IIEST board of governors on May 12 ended without approving the list of selected candidates.
Forty per cent of the 300-odd sanctioned teaching posts are vacant, teachers on the Shibpur campus said. Interviews for the current recruitment cycle for 102 posts started in August 2022, they said.
The interviews were over in January 2023 but the board has yet to approve the list of selected candidates.
“The indecision comes at a time when the number of students at IIEST has increased many times,” a teacher said.
The letter — signed by Tapendu Mandal, secretary of the teachers’ association, and addressed to V.K. Atre — also says many teachers are yet to get promotion though it has long been due.
While other centrally-funded technical institutions are completing the faculty recruitment process within two months, IIEST is making inordinate delays, the association said.
“The mishandling of the current faculty recruitment process is bound to have far-reaching consequences. No wonder this institute would slide down further in the NIRF (National Institutional Ranking Framework) list. While other institutions are going ahead with faculty recruitment, IIEST may experience faculty attrition due to significant career stagnation,” the letter says.
When contacted by The Telegraph, Atre declined to comment.
Mandal said: “Those who do the ranking give weightage to the teacher-student ratio. At present, the ratio at IIEST is 1:20. The education ministry wants the ratio to be 1:12. The ratio is bound to go down further as teachers are not being recruited despite a surge in student intake. So, this will trigger a further slide.”
IIEST slipped to 40th position in NIRF’s engineering category last year. In 2021, its rank was 27.
A member of the board of governors said: “At the May 12 meeting, a member prevented IIEST director Parthasarathi Chakarabarti from announcing the names of those selected for teaching positions on the grounds that Chakarabarti was officiating as director from May 9. The member said an officiating director should not decide on recruitment.”
However, another member of the board told this newspaper that the Union education ministry had on February 25 issued an order stating that officiating directors at NITs and IIEST can initiate a recruitment process and announce the names of the selected candidates to the board.
Chakarabarti did not respond to calls and texts messages from this newspaper.