The government has decided to pay higher salaries of Rs 67,000 to Rs 79,000 to up to 40 per cent of the professors in centrally funded technical institutes, including the IITs and the IIMs.
The move retains, in a different way, a 40 per cent cap on higher pay that teachers had protested against last year.
Under the Sixth Pay Commission recommendations, professors in the central institutes were entitled to between Rs 37,400 and Rs 67,000 a month with an additional grade pay of Rs 10,500 to Rs 12,000.
There was, however, a condition. At any point, only 40 per cent professors of an institute were to be eligible for the additional grade pay of Rs 12,000 a month, subject to their performance.
IIT teachers had been up in arms against the condition because they felt the 40 per cent cap would discriminate against young professors.
Once senior professors were selected for the Rs 12,000 grade pay, they would stay in the 40 per cent bracket till retirement. The younger professors would therefore lose out. Teachers at IIT Kharagpur had refused to hold classes last year, angered by the pay policy.
The new higher administrative grade (HAG) pay scale has raised the salaries to between Rs 67,000 and Rs 79,000, but only up to 40 per cent of the professors can qualify for the HAG scale. These professors will not receive any grade pay.
Those professors who do not qualify for the HAG scale will get between Rs 37,400 and Rs 67,000 a month, as the pay panel had recommended. They will be eligible for the additional grade pay of Rs 10,500 to Rs 12,000.
In the IITs, IIMs, Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research and the Indian Institute of Science, 40 per cent of professors will get the HAG pay. In other centrally funded institutes such as the National Institutes of Technology, the Indian School of Mines in Dhanbad and the School of Planning and Architecture, 20 per cent professors will be in the higher pay bracket.
The human resource development ministry has conveyed its decision to the directors of all the 100 institutions that will implement the new scale with effect from August 18, 2009, the date the sixth pay panel package was notified.
An IIT Delhi professor welcomed the new package but disapproved of the 40 per cent cap. “The decision to offer a new package to senior professors is welcome. The 40 per cent cap is not ethical,” said S.S. Murthy, president of IIT Delhi Faculty Forum.
Source : The Telegraph.
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