Tirupati: Faculty crunch cripples varsities

Tirupati: The university education in the state is suffering with the Vice Chancellors of state universities appear to have become mere spectators in imparting quality education and providing better academic and research avenues in the universities. The situation, particularly in 'young universities', is more pathetic as they lack basic infrastructure facilities.

Apart from big cut in block grants allocated to each university by the state government, they suffer from huge number of faculty vacancies for over a decade.

It was in 2007, when the permanent teaching faculty recruitment was done and after which no faculty was appointed on permanent basis. The universities have been moving ahead with academic consultants. On the top of it, the state government issued GO No 167 on November 4 making it clear that no university can appoint any guest/ad hoc/contract faculty without the permission of the government. Further, several departments have no assistant professors at all while some others do not have associate professors.

Sources said that SV University has at least 251 vacancies while Andhra University tops the list with 373 vacant positions. The vacant teaching positions in other universities are 82 in Nagarjuna University, 68 in SPMVV, 75 in Rayalaseema University, 96 in SK University, 86 in Vikrama Simhapuri University, 70 in Yogi Vemana University and about 800 posts in IIITs and RGUKT.

AS per the UGC guidelines of 1986, every department must have one professor, 2 associate professors and 4 asst professors at base level. The teachers argue that the formation of rationalization committee is against the UGC guidelines with an intention to reduce the vacancies to cut the block grants to universities.

This reduction of vacancies had resulted in serious impact on the research contributions of each departments. When contacted, the state convenor of Akhil Bharatiya Rashtriya Shaikshik Mahasangh (ABRSM) Prof YV Rami Reddy told The Hans India that putting a ban on the appointment of contract faculty without the permission of state government is against the autonomy of universities.

At a time when the fresh batch of PG students will be entering the campuses this move will severely hamper the academic standards, he feared.

He added that ABRSM has been seriously condemning the state government's attitude in filling the vacant teaching posts which are about 50 percent of the total faculty strength. This is against the UGC guidelines and will have negative impact on universities in getting good ranking from NAAC.

Covid lockdown protests rage in China

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There are also videos of protests from various university campuses where students came out in the open to oppose the lockdowns.

During the weekend, Urumqi witnessed a huge demonstration in which many Han Chinese nationals took part along with Uygur Muslims.

Urumqi authorities on Saturday said the city would lift coronavirus restrictions "in phases" after footage surfaced online showing rare protests against a three-month lockdown, Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported on Sunday.

The footage of protests, which was later censored, showed hundreds of residents in a public square outside a government office, chanting slogans "serve the people" and "end the lockdown", and singing the national anthem. In Beijing, people from several compounds, under lockdowns for days, also staged protests, leading to officials withdrawing the curbs. Meanwhile, the National Health Commission on Sunday said 39,501 coronavirus cases, including 35,858 asymptomatic cases, were reported in the country by the end of Saturday as mass Covid tests were carried out across China to identify new clusters of infection. It is for the fourth consecutive day that China reported an increase in cases, the highest since it recorded a sharp spike in cases in top cities like Shanghai in April.