The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, is keenly looking at addressing the issues of faculty crunch in the engineering colleges.
The institute, under its Eklavya project, will train about 600 faculties simultaneously through the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) across 20 centres in India.
Starting December 2008, the two-month training sessions would cover the basic syllabus of engineering.
Deepak B Phatak, Subrao Nilekani, chair professor, department of computer science and engineering, IIT Bombay, says, “In a bid to eradicate the issue of faculty crunch from the grass root level, we initiated this programme last year for some faculties for two weeks. But this December, we will initiate it in a big way to at least 30 faculty members at our each of our 20 centers for two months.”
The institute will increase the number of centers to 50 and every center will continue to train 30 faculty members. He adds, “We will see 30,000 faculty members trained across the country in coming three years.”
The training will take place twice a year during summer and winter holidays when faculty members are free.
IIT’s course material will be available to these faculty members, who can then modify, edit and use it according to the syllabus at their respective colleges. The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has quite often been recommending reduction of seats in the colleges due to lack of infrastructure and less availability of faculty. Phatak says, “At the smaller colleges, usually there are only 60-70% of faculty members than the actual number of required faculties. These colleges then survive on guest lecturers.”
The institute is currently in talks with the government to get financial support and if required, will take a route to self funding program, where the faculty members will have to pay their own fees.
