The State government move to maintain a tight control over appointments to teaching posts in colleges has made job aspirants, including research scholars, a concerned lot. Fearing that the ongoing steps to tighten workload norms for teachers could bring in a virtual recruitment freeze in the sector, they are planning to launch an agitation.
The Higher Education Department revised the norms to determine workload for teaching posts in government and aided arts and science colleges over the past two months. As per the orders, teaching posts could only be sanctioned by maintaining a workload of 16 hours a week for each faculty member. Moreover, the government also reversed its order of May 9, 2018, which had stipulated 16 teaching hours, but permitted the creation of posts when the “remaining workload is 9 hours and above.”
No extra weightage
Besides increasing workload from 9 hours, the government also scrapped the system of providing additional weightage to postgraduate classes. So far, while calculating the workload for staff fixation, each teaching hour in postgraduate classes was considered as one-and-a-half hours.
Job aspirants fear that several hundreds of posts would be scrapped with the government deciding to do away with the positions created on the basis of workloads less than 16 hours.
Aleena S., convener of the United Action Forum to Protect Collegiate Education, an umbrella organisation of research scholars, students and job aspirants, said 2,500-4,000 could be scrapped and that appointments could be held up for around 10 years. She claimed that the government failed to factor in the examination duty, laboratory work and responsibilities relating to dissertation and project work while fixing work hours. The All Kerala Research Scholars Association, a sub-committee of the CPI(M)-feeder Students Federation of India (SFI), has also taken exception to the government move.
Research guides
Association State convener Gopikrishna V.G. said the decision was bound to affect availability of research guides. While the government had promised to create 1,000 teaching posts in the aided sector, Mr. Gopikrishna said a bulk of these were meant for new-generation courses and were unlikely to compensate for the lost posts.