Faculty shortage at PEC has hit critical level: External review committee

The faculty shortage at Punjab Engineering College (PEC) has reached critical level due to steep rise in student intake and expansion of master and doctoral programmes, said a report by the external peer review committee (EPRC).

The report was recently submitted and discussed at the board of governors (BOG) meeting of the institute held on Wednesday.

As per the EPRC’s observations, the desired strength of faculty based on prevailing norms of student faculty should be 312, but currently there are 162 sanctioned posts in the institute. There are 98 regular faculty members, of which 18 are non PhD. As many as 48 temporary faculty members are working in various departments.

The gap between sanctioned faculty strength and actual strength has reached close to 50% in some departments. There were 2,795 undergraduate students, 206 post-graduate students and 183 doctoral research students in the 2022-2023 session.

The EPRC has recommended that recruitment of faculty must be taken up on priority. The scale/level of pay must be on par with the various National Institutes of Technology (NITs) to attract quality faculty. PEC should also establish a formal mechanism for professors to practice from industry which is already there in IITs to bridge the academia-industry gap. Senior-grade professors should be promoted to motivate them in their research and teaching. It was observed that many felt that there are no further promotion prospects for the professors at PEC.

It was shared that despite being one of the oldest engineering institutions in the country, the institute had to seek approval from the UT administration for major decisions and lacked autonomy. The authority to create posts for faculty and staff is also not with BoG.

The committee has recommended that the institute should attempt to get its status converted as a centrally funded technical institute (CFTI) like the NITs/IISETs and to function as an autonomous institute, bylaws should be amended, and its governing body and senate composition must be aligned with NITs and IISETs. Autonomy related to academic issues must be with the director as the senate chairperson.

In its report, EPRC also recommended that middle-level staff like assistant registrars and deputy registrars be appointed to streamline work. A security officer is also urgently required. The institute should start UG and PG programmes as per requirements of the industry and society to make students more employable.

Despite visible growth in research and consultancy, the number of patents, consultancy projects and sponsored research is low, and the committee recommended it should work on it. PEC’s performance in the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) in the last six years was also called below expectation and the institute was asked to work on ranking frameworks, including teaching learning process, research and publication, patents and student-faculty ratio.

The EPRC was constituted by the BoG on April 8, 2022, to review the performance of the institute and to prepare a roadmap. This is the first time the institute constituted such a committee after the institute’s recent decline in NIRF rankings. The committee is chaired by Satish Kumar, chairman of the Armaments Research Board, Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). Other members include Pushvinder Jit Singh, managing director, Tynor Orthotics; Keya Dharamvir, general secretary, Society for Promotion of Science and Technology in India, Lalit Kumar Awasthi, director of NIT, Uttarakhand, Chandigarh BJP leader Sanjay Tandon and Col Prabhdeep Singh Sandhu (retd), an alumnus and former secretary to the Panjab University vice-chancellor.

The EPRC had visited the campus between November 28 and 30, 2022, before preparing this report.