IITs, IIMs to reward professors with more faculty chairs

he Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) have decided to create more chairs in the institutes to help professors top up their salaries. The money that comes to these chairs from corporations will be the additional incentive for the professors.

IIT-Bombay plans to increase the number of faculty chairs to 50 from the current 20 by the year-end. Each chair, the institute estimates, can provide a top-up salary of Rs 20,000 per professor. Recently, Rahul Bajaj and Naushad Forbes committed one chair each at IIT-Bombay. The institute already has chairs from Larsen and Toubro and ICICI Bank among others.

"There are only two ways of increasing the salary for the faculty: either the human resource development ministry increases it or we have new means of creating chairs. We have decided to go the other way. Earlier, we used the chair money to give salaries to the professors. But now we use it to give their top-up salaries," says Ashok Misra, director, IIT-Bombay.

In order to attract and retain quality faculty, the institute will provide a ‘signing bonus' of Rs 3 lakh over three years — Rs 1 lakh over each year to its new professors. The professors would have to sign a three-year bond with the premier institution to avail of the same. Faculty members who joined the institute from January 2008 will also be entitled for the signing bonus.

IIM-Calcutta will be creating some chairs in the institute shortly for the first time. "The due diligence with some corporate houses is on. We are looking at several proposals," said an IIM-C professor. He, however, does not agree with the view that these chairs provide top-up salary of the professors. "The chairs are primarily for research and business ideas," he added.

IIT-Madras is looking at taking the number of chairs to 25 from the current 6.

Companies create chairs in the various B-schools with the objective of using the services of the chair professors to do research on problems areas identified by the sponsoring company.

Sponsoring research is another level of industry-academia interaction apart from the internship at corporate houses. Indian companies have started setting up excellence centres and giving research projects to academic institutions. "This trend however, is stronger in IITs than in B-schools," says a professor.

While research helps the academia gain real world insights by solving real world problems, the industry benefits by receiving knowledge created by the academic research. The institutes are also looking at this option to counter offers to their faculty from the private sector.