Postgraduate students who were hired from technical colleges as faculty members under the Ministry of Education’s Technical Education Quality Improvement Program (TEQIP) are demanding appointments in their project institutes, reports The Indian Express. The faculty protested outside Shastri Bhavan in Delhi.

The programme aims at improving the quality of technical education especially in low-income and special category states by providing qualified faculty members from the top technical colleges in the states.

According to a clause under the programme, the faculty members pointed, “well-performing faculty hired using project funds will be retained post-project, all else unchanged.”

The project is set to end on September 30. The TEQIP qualified faculty members who are protesting have been teaching as assistant professors in the concerned institutes since January 2018.

The Minister of Education Dharmendra Pradhan had earlier said that the ministry wrote to the “Chief Secretaries of Focus States requesting to plan for continuation of activities undertaken during TEQIP-III, for maintaining the quality of education,” regarding the employment f the candidates beyond the project.

An official in the Madhya Pradesh technical education department, however, said there are no administrative posts available under which they can be appointed. Further, the project implementation unit of Chhattisgarh has written to the concerned institutes that the faculty can only continue as guest faculty on an hourly basis, with a maximum pay of Rs 21,000 per month. TEQIP faculty members are currently earning Rs 70,000 per month under the project.

Anand Chaturvedi, who studied at IIT Kharagpur and has been working at Kamala Nehru Institute of Technology, Sultanpur told The Indian Express, “After my MTech I had worked at a London-based MNC but I was interested in academia and this was a great project so I had applied for it. But these 3.5 years of academic experience will not be counted in industries and we can’t seek work there. We want to be retained in the institutes where we have invested so much time.”

Read all the Latest News, Breaking News and Coronavirus News here