Director Sankar K. Pal at the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta, today received a fresh incentive that he says may help coax promising faculty from India and abroad to join the 77-year old institution.
The Union cabinet today approved a proposal to de-link pay scales of scientists at the ISI, Calcutta, and its centres in Bangalore and New Delhi, from the University Grants Commission, and upgrade them to those at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
The new scales will apply to assistant professors, associate professors and professors at the ISI. “We’re happy,” Pal said. “Now we will be able to compete (for faculty) against some of India’s other premier institutions on equal terms.”
Pal said an assistant professor at the ISI draws a base salary of Rs 10,000, in contrast to a base salary of Rs 12,000 for an assistant professor at the IISc, Bangalore, which follows the same scales as the Indian Institutes of Technology.
The Centre had notified new pay scales for UGC institutions on January 1, 2009, which effectively will raise the base salary of an assistant professor to Rs 22,200.
However, a government-appointed committee tasked with formulating revised pay scales for the IISc and the IITs is expected to submit its recommendations next month. If the government accepts them, the scales for these institutions will also go up.
Over the past three years, Pal said, 10 to 12 candidates among 38 offered positions at one of the three ISI centres have opted to join the IISc or the IITs.
Only last month, he said, a former ISI student who had obtained a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and was in a post-doctoral position at the University of Toronto, Canada, turned down an offer from the ISI and joined the IISc. “He was one of our best products,” Pal told.
The ISI, established by P.C. Mahalanobis in December 1931, has developed into an institution engaged in research across diverse disciplines — applied and theoretical statistics, mathematics, computational sciences, biological sciences and earth sciences, among others. An act of Parliament in 1959 had declared the ISI as an institution of national importance.
Faculty at the ISI had initiated proposals to raise their pay scales about three years ago. “There has been a feeling that we are at par with the IITs or the IIScs in research,” said T.S.S.R.K Rao, the head of the ISI Bangalore centre.
“In some disciplines, we have less teaching loads and our faculty has more time for research,” Pal said.
Source : The Telegraph.
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