In order to improve quality of technical education in backward districts of the country, the HRD Ministry on Wednesday announced that it has placed more than 1,000 highly qualified technical graduates drawn from premier institutions in the deprived colleges.
HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar said that the Ministry has recruited more than 1,000 graduates from institutions like IITs and NITs to teach in engineering colleges in States like Assam, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Tripura, J&K, Uttar Pradesh and Odisha among others.
Javadekar said this has been done to fulfil the vision of the Prime Minister to provide thrust to good quality technical and higher education in the backward areas of the country. With this measure, more than one lakh engineering students in the most backward areas would be benefited with better quality education. Many of these institutions have vacancies of teaching faculty (some of them have 40 per cent vacancies) and the States have made a request to the Ministry to help to find teaching support.
This is the first time that such a measure has been taken to improve the quality of education. These bright minds will bring with them the openness to innovation, new methods of teaching and enthusiasm to serve and act as agents of change. Such an initiative will help meet the aspirations of the youth in the backward areas and would contribute to the entire educational eco-system of the backward areas, apart from promoting a start-up culture among students,” Javadekar said at a Press conference.
The Ministry had appealed to the MTech and PhD scholars from the premier institutions to express interest to work in these backward areas and serve the nation for which more than 5,000 highly-qualified persons applied. The interviews were conducted in 20 NITs by constituting expert teams. Other States where this programme has been undertaken are Andaman & Nicobar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand etc.
While 86 per cent of the teachers are from premier institutions like IITs/NITs/IISERs/ IIITs, 24 percent of them are PhDs. Each of the new faculty will be paid Rs 70,000 per month and the Government is planning to spend about Rs 375 crore in three-year period on this initiative.
“The entire process of giving a call and selection has been completed through a competitive and rigorous process of selection done through NITs in a record 2-month period. Finally, 1225 candidates were selected and they have joined 53 colleges in these States. The new faculty will train the youngsters in host of technical institutions for the next 3-years,” said a HRD Ministry official.
The HRD Ministry had started a Technical Education Quality Improvement Project (TEQIP-III) for improving the quality of engineering graduates at a cost of Rs 2,300 crore to be implemented in three-year period till 2020.