The governing body of India’s elite Indian Institutes of Technology on Friday approved a long-standing proposal to ease restrictions on the hiring of foreign professors, The Times of India reports. Previously, the engineering schools could employ non-Indian professors for a maximum of five years. Now they can be hired on a permanent basis and can fill up to 10 percent of the total academic positions. The 15 schools face a severe faculty crunch, with only 2,983 of a total of 4,267 faculty positions filled. The governing body—chaired by Kapil Sibal, the minister in charge of higher education—also decided to expand enrollment limits for foreign students, who can now fill 25 percent of total seats in the schools’ graduate courses. The governing body has also approved a controversial move to allow the schools to start offering medical degrees. The All India IIT Faculty Federation, which represents faculty members at the schools, criticized the governing body for not resolving a salary issue raised by the faculty last year. Instead of receiving the salary increases announced in 2008 for public universities, the engineering faculty want higher salaries.