Posted in: Featured, Guest Articles on November 1, 2009 | Tags: Guest Articles | Comments (3)

Don’t let the IIT faculty strikes fool you. For the academically inclined, IIXs are still the best.

T. A. Abinandanan is a Professor in the Department of Materials Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He writes extensively on a wide range of topics concerning higher education in India, particularly the IITs, IIMs, IISc and such other institutes. His writings can be found at http://nanopolitan.blogspot.com .The Scholars’ Avenue thanks Dr.Abinandanan for contributing this article.

IIT faculty made history in September 2009 when they went on hunger strike — not just once, but twice! Their strikes were to press their demands for a better deal from the Sixth Pay Commission (SPC), and to protest against what they perceived as an “insult” and “a slap in our face.”

In spite of those anger-laden phrases and industrial protest actions, I am here to argue that the IIXs (where X = T, M, Sc, SER, ….) continue to be among the best — if not the best — places in India for the academically oriented among you. The protest by IIT faculty (cheered from the sidelines by others in IIXs) should not be allowed to block your view of arguably the brightest picture in Indian academy.

Before I get to that picture, let me first take care of a blot in it. Almost all IIXs suffer from not infrequent interruptions in flow of electrons, water, and data. One could add other problems such as poorly trained (and poorly paid) support staff. While IIXs will eventually find suitable long-term solutions, there certainly are work-arounds for each of these problems. Indeed, many scientists have overcome them to go on to run world class research groups.

With that out of the way, let’s now turn to what’s so great about a faculty job at an IIX, and why the academically inclined among you should consider such a job as a serious option.

You are probably interested in the first thing that everyone focuses on — the ‘pay package.’ Fortunately, it is also the easiest to address.

Here’s the bottomline: IIXs are among the best in the public sector. They beat private academic institutions handily. With job security, autonomy, sabbaticals and the summer months off, they are competitive with private industry as well. With the option to consult for industry, you’ll have to wonder if a non-IIX job is even worth considering!

Here are the details: Going by the present, post-SPC salaries, you’ll start as an assistant professor at Rs. 6 lakhs, at the end of your career, you’ll be at over 12 lakhs. Thus, you can expect to earn about Rs. 30 million — Rs. 3 crores — over a career spanning 30 years. Or, an average of about Rs. 10 lakhs per year.

But that’s just the salary, which does not include the ‘benefits’: allowances (house rent, transport, telephone and internet), social security contributions (pension or provident funds, career-end bonus, etc) and perks (medical insurance, leave travel concession, for example). The value of these benefits could easily exceed 50 percent of the salary.

And then there is consulting. It can give you the satisfaction of solving some real world problems. It can be a great source of ideas for long term research. Most importantly, it also has the highly desirable property of giving you some extra cash! Indeed, every IIX has quite a few superstars whose earnings through consulting dwarf their salaries.

In these days of economic slow-down, pay-cuts, and lay-offs, I’m sure it’s reassuring to know that your IIX salary is not only fully protected, it’ll also (a) keep up with inflation, (b) keep rising (through annual increments) and (c) see substantial jumps every decade or so. To sweeten things even more, IITs are planning to introduce incentives to reward extraordinary performance (and I’m sure other IIXs will follow suit).

Let me now turn to a few relevant comparisons.

As an IIX faculty member, you’ll enjoy a couple of features that are not available to engineers and managers in industry (in both public and public sectors): two (or even three) months off every summer and a one-year sabbatical leave every seven years.

As an IIX faculty member, you’ll enjoy an advantage over those in other academic institutions — public or private. Research funding, infrastructure, access to bright students, culture of nurturing research, travel grants — on every one of these parameters, IIXs offer you a better deal than any other university or research lab.

As an IIX faculty member — and this may come as a surprise to you — you’ll also enjoy certain advantages over faculty in US universities. First, you don’t have to pay your graduate students, the government pays them. More importantly, the same research idea has a far higher probability of getting funded in India than in the US. This means that you’ll spend more of your time on actually doing research, than on writing grant applications seeking that ever-elusive funding.

Finally, the autonomy, the choice and the flexibility. As an IIX faculty member, you’ll probably spend 30 to 40 percent of your time in teaching and related activities. The remaining time is yours, and yours alone — nobody tells you how to spend it. You could use it for research (for getting peer recognition), teaching (for your students’ adulation), and consulting (for money, and collaboration with industrial partners). There are other academic pursuits as well: writing books and popular science articles, teaching kids in local schools and colleges, learning about new and emerging fields, etc.

What you do depends only on what you think is right for you — that sweet spot in the multidimensional space of knowledge, scholarship, peer recognition, money, respect, fame. The IIXs offer you a variety of activities to choose from, and they do not impose any restriction on what you could or could not do.

At an IIX, you dance to your own tune, and not to some institutional music. And the Indian government, which is in a tremendous hurry to develop India’s scientific and technological capabilities, will help you make your tune and your dance better — with research money, with opportunities, with students.

I don’t think you can ask for more — except when the future Pay Commissions screw up!

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