IIT faculty to go on hunger strike on Sept 24 India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

Over 1,000 faculty members of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) would go on a hunger strike on September 24 (Thursday) to protest the anomalies in the recently announced pay structure. The decision was taken at a meeting of the All India Indian Institutes of Technology Faculty Federation (AIIITFF) held at IIT Kharagpur's extension centre in Kolkata on Monday. The revised pay structure has re-designated the post of Lecturer-cum-post-Doctoral Fellows as Assistant Professors, to be appointed on contractual terms. It also places a 40 percent cap on promotion of Professors to Senior Grade. According to M.Thenmozhi, President of AIIITFF, the new pay scales, as per recommendations of the Sixth pay Commission, has affected the status of the country's premier engineering institutes. “Faculty members at all the IITs are upset with this type. Basically not in terms of a higher pay or in terms of a higher scale or fixing it at a higher level. Basically the whole IIT system, the culture, the credibility you are talking about, is affected through this process and that is what has hurt all of us here,” Thenmozhi said. “So, as a token of our discontent of what's happening, all IITs are taking up a protest on September 24 (Thursday), where we're going for a hunger strike. We will be on hunger strike, but we will take classes,” Thenmozhi added. Thenmozhi further said that the federation would submit a memorandum to the Union Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry on Tuesday.