RTI shows zero ST, OBC and only one SC candidate appointed as associate professor at IIT Bombay in 14 years  

According to answers submitted in an RTI response, IIT Bombay failed to recruit even a single Associate Professor from ST communities or OBC communities in the last 14 years and not a single Assistant Professor from the ST category in 12 years. On the occasion of activist and reformist Savitribai Phule death anniversary, IIT Bombay’s Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle released the information to throw light on the dismal number of faculty from marginalised communities on the campus.

The RTI shows that only six OBC candidates were recruited to Assistant Professor posts between 2009 to 2020. Two in 2019 and one in 2009, 2011, 2012 and 2018. There was not a single Associate Professor appointed 2007 and 2020 from the community. The institute managed to recruit only three SC assistant professors in the last 12 years, one each in 2015, 2019 and 2020. And only one SC Associate Professor since 2007. 

In the same time period, 308 unreserved category candidates were recruited to the Assistant Professor posts. Since 2007, 42 Associate Professors from unreserved categories were hired by the institute, while only one SC professor was appointed in 2016.

The Circle has been consistently highlighting the marginalisation on IIT Bombay’s campus. The APPSC said that they had first filed an RTI to seek details of faculty recruitment in December 2020. And again on the birth anniversary of Savithribai Phule on January 3. “We didn’t get most of the responses that we had sought the first time, so we re-applied. But the second time, we got a few but many questions remained unanswered,” a member of the APPSC said. 

The students had demanded to know the recruitment for the post of Assistant Professor against non-availability of SC, ST, OBC candidates and the details of which department they were recruited to. To this the Institute had said that IIT Bombay followed a flexible cadre system for appointment of faculty, “Thus the overall sanctioned strength of faculty in different grades is not fixed. Hence information cannot be provided,” the RTI response said. 

The APPSC was unable to get a response on the number of candidates who had been shortlisted and how many belonged to marginalised communities. For the question on how many recruitment drives the institute had conducted in order to hire more candidates from these communities, the institute said that ‘no information was available'. The number of applications for the position of Assistant Professor that the institute has received in 2019 was — SC - 19, ST - 03, OBC - 46 and in 2020, it was SC - 26, ST - 02, OBC -20. The institute did maintain that they were following reservation norms prescribed by the Government of India to it.