Shortage of Faculty Members at Osmania University

One of the oldest University in the country, Osmania University, Hyderabad is facing the shortage of faculties in various departments.

Recently, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had asked University Grants Commission (UGC) to look into the faculty shortage in universities across the country.

UGC has started checking the faculty ratios in the universities. UGC found that OU is running the departments with only one faculty member.

The varsity's Psychology department has been functioning with single professor, who will retire by 31st January 2014. Even several departments are also functioning with single faculty member.

Earlier the department had 11 faculty members, which came down to one.

If the situation continues, by the year 2018, university may become "Zero Faculty Member University".

Around 40 professors retire every year and there is no recruitment for that position.

Currently, the Nutrition department does not have one single professor to function.

The other departments like Geophysics have 4 out of 24, Geology have 9 out of 21, Sociology have 6 out of 16, Public Administration have 9 out of 20, Hindi have 4 out of 16, Education have 8 out of 20, Biomedical Engineering have 6 out of 18, Astronomy have 5 out of 14, Statistics have 8 out of 17, Ancient Indian History, Culture and Archeology have only 1 out of 20 faculty members.

"Running a university without professors is like running a hospital without doctors. There is no use of having huge buildings and infrastructure facilities without having qualified faculty. The university is in a financial crisis and because of this, it has stopped recruitment of regular professors. OU has to pay a salary of nearly Rs 1.05 lakh per month for a professor and Rs 85,000 for an associate professor. To avoid this, it is settling for contract staff who are paid only Rs 21,000. Many of the contract employees lack basic qualifications of PhD or NET," said Prof. B. Satyanarayana, president, OU Teachers' Association.

Prof S. Satyanarayana, Vice-Chancellor, OU said, "We got a block grant of just Rs 171 crore this year, which is hardly enough to pay salaries and pensions for the existing staff. We cannot afford to recruit professors with this amount."