Universities in Andhra Pradesh are reeling under acute shortage of teaching faculty, and the malady has reflected in the recent India Rankings-2023 by the National Institute Ranking Framework (NIRF) of the Union Ministry of Education.
After reviewing the poor performance of the State’s institutions at the national level, officials at the helm of the State Council of Higher Education (APSCHE) have decided to set higher targets and work diligently to achieve them.
The officials admit that 60% of the faculty posts are lying vacant in the universities across the State, and the number of vacant posts is higher in older institutions such as Andhra University in Visakhapatnam, Acharya Nagarjuna University in Guntur, Sri Venkateswara University in Tirupati, and Sri Krishnadevaraya University in Anantapur districts.
Job calendar
Though the government had issued a job calendar allowing recruitment of 2,000 assistant professors in various universities, the process could not be initiated due to pending litigations before the Division Bench of the State High Court.
The APSCHE has not been able to recruit teaching faculty for more than five years now, and the students are the ultimate sufferers of this delay. The APSCHE officials have drawn the government’s notice to the immediacy of the issue and the need to dispose of the pending cases.
Rationalisation
A committee for rationalisation of teaching posts in the universities had been constituted in 2015 and a G.O. was issued on June 30, 2017, giving permission to fill the vacant teaching posts.
The universities, in turn, had issued notifications between September 2017 and January 2018 by taking group of subjects in each category of posts (i.e. assistant professors, associate professors and professors) separately for the Arts, Sciences, Engineering and Languages, and applied reservations as per the State policy.
Pleas in High Court
But a batch of writ petitions filed in the High Court cited the Supreme Court verdict upholding the judgment of a Division Bench of the Allahabad High Court directing a local university of that State to apply reservation by treating the department / subject as a ‘unit’ for all levels of teachers.
The petitioners in the A.P. High Court questioned the recommendations of the rationalisation committee, the conduct of the written test by the AP Public Service Commission (APPSC), and failure to notify the posts based on the Supreme Court judgment, among other factors.
Disposing the petitions, the High Court had on March 5, 2021, directed the State to take steps to formulate a scheme to fix the ‘unit’ for application of the roster system in the universities. The court had also set aside the notifications issued earlier by the 14 universities and passed certain strictures for the institutions to follow, and directed them to expeditiously complete the process of rationalisation of the teaching staff before initiating a fresh recruitment process.
In accordance with the judgment, the State government enacted the AP State Educational Institutions (Reservation in Teacher’s Cadre) Act, 2021, on December 21, 2021, fixing University / Institution as a ‘unit’ for reservation.
The APSCHE has constituted an advisory committee to help the universities in the process of rationalisation.
