New Delhi, April 15: The non-Kashmiri students of NIT Srinagar today demanded that at least half their teachers be recruited from other states to assuage their fears about local teachers sabotaging their academic careers.

The demand echoes a collective decision taken by the institutes in 2011 but defeated by outstation teachers' reluctance to come to Srinagar, officials claim.

So far, the government has been cold to the non-local students' original demand to shift the institute out of the Valley or relocate them to other NITs. Today, a group of these students voiced the revised demand while protesting at Jantar Mantar.

These students had fled Srinagar after a clash with their Kashmiri peers who had celebrated India's World T20 defeat and a caning by police when the outstation students' subsequent protest allegedly turned violent.

"Except the director, the entire faculty is from Kashmir," a student at Jantar Mantar said. "We want 50 per cent teachers from other states so that non-Kashmiri students feel more confident."

Some of the students have alleged that, after the campus strife, their teachers had threatened to fail them in their exams.

But the teachers have rubbished such fears before a visiting team from the Union human resource development ministry, saying no student has ever been victimised in examinations for being a non-Kashmiri.

Two NIT directors, who wouldn't be quoted, told this newspaper that the institutes and the government had done nothing to implement a decision the tech schools' highest decision-making body, the NIT Council, had taken on June 28, 2011. It had prodded all the NITs to try and recruit at least half their teachers and a fourth of their non-teaching staff from outside their states.

But all the teachers at NIT Srinagar are from Kashmir while the ratio is one outstation teacher among three in all the other NITs, the directors said. All the NITs, including the one at Srinagar, are split 50:50 between local and outstation students under admission rules.

An NIT Council official said that outstation teachers didn't want to come to Srinagar because of security concerns and the institute's mediocre academic record.

In a recent government ranking, NIT Srinagar was 67th among India's engineering institutions, trailing 12 of the 30 other NITs.

But the NIT directors this newspaper spoke to said the government and the Srinagar institute could well have lured outstation teachers with incentives such as better travel allowances, good labs and research grants.

The agitating students are expected to meet human resource development minister Smriti Irani soon with their latest demand. They may ask that teachers from other NITs evaluate their papers.

Two first-year BTech students said they didn't want to return to the institute, nor did they want to leave the course halfway.

Several first-year students had taken the JEE Main exam on April 3 - they had applied long before the clashes and were hoping to qualify for preferred streams or colleges. Many of them are now more resolved to switch colleges although it means losing a year and the money they have paid to the Srinagar institute.

Students from the second, third or fourth years are likelier to continue at NIT Srinagar, unwilling to sacrifice multiple years and large sums of money.

"I'm too scared to return to Srinagar. My father is worried too. But I don't know what to do," a student said, requesting anonymity.