New Delhi — India’s minister in charge of higher education told reporters on Friday that he has “no problem” with India’s elite engineering and management institutes’ hiring foreign faculty members. Until now the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management have been allowed to hire foreign professors only on a part-time or contract basis.

“Following dearth of qualified teachers in the field of higher education, we have no problem inviting foreign nationals or people with Indian origin as teachers for IIT’s and IIM’s provided they fulfill the stipulated legal formalities,” Arjun Singh, minister of human-resource development, told local reporters.

Ashok Misra, director of Mumbai’s Indian Institute of Technology, told The Chronicle that the institutes had yet to get a formal letter approving foreign hiring, but that the minister’s statement seemed to indicate such an approval was imminent. The country’s seven Indian Institutes of Technology and six Indian Institutes of Management –- at all of which instruction is in English — have in recent years sought approval of full-time foreign hires to combat faculty shortages.

“Exposure to foreign faculty is very important for the students and will help boost research as well,” said Mr. Misra, adding that most engineering schools around the world have faculty members from different countries. Mr. Misra said that academics in some European countries as well as Indian expatriates who settled abroad for jobs had expressed interest in teaching at the engineering institutes. He added, though, that the low salaries would need to be raised in order to attract foreign professors to the local jobs. —Shailaja Neelakantan