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May 28, 2009, 10:36 AM ET
Recession Prompts Foreign Academics to Seek Jobs at Indian Universities
An unlikely beneficiary of the global economic slowdown is India’s faculty-needy higher-education sector.
The country’s university regulator said it had been inundated with applications from Indian and other professors who currently teach at universities abroad, The Times of India reported. The “surprised” regulator, as the Indian Express reported, is convening a committee of university heads to work out a way to get the best of the applicants into India’s universities.
“There is an opportunity in economic recession,” S.K. Thorat, chairman of the University Grants Commission, India’s university regulator, told The Times. “We have received hundreds of applications expressing interest in taking up teaching assignments in India,” he added. Most seek appointments at the 15 new central universities that will open this year, at the six new Indian Institutes of Technology that started last year, or the two new institutes scheduled to open in July, he said.
In a bid to combat faculty shortages, the Indian government last December awarded hefty pay increases, averaging 70 percent, for the 500,000 academics who teach in the public-university system, and that move is also a likely draw to foreign academics.
India’s engineering colleges suffer faculty shortages of 20 to 30 percent, while one in five faculty positions are vacant at the seven elite public-management institutions. As many as 50 percent of positions are vacant at federal and state-financed universities.
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