Higher education: 5,500 faculty posts vacant in public colleges in the Punjab

No requisitions for recruitment have been sent to the PPSC in three years .

LAHORE:

As many as 5,500 faculty positions in colleges across the province have been lying vacant as the Higher Education Department (HED) has not sent requisitions to the Punjab Public Service Commission (PPSC) to recruit teachers against the vacancies for three years.

Requesting anonymity, an HED official said last week, Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif had chaired a meeting in this regard and reprimanded HED officers for not sending requisitions to the PPSC for recruitments to vacancies.

Over the last three years, the government has established 90 degree colleges in the province, but no new teachers (lecturers, assistant professors, associate professors or professors) have been recruited. There are a total 20,000 sanctioned faculty posts in 651 degree colleges, of which 5,500 are lying vacant.



According to policy, the government should recruit 22 faculty members and 28 non-teaching staff for a degree college prior to the start of teaching. Campuses of public colleges offering classes from the intermediate to post-graduate levels are constructed at a cost of Rs120 million to Rs130 million over at least four acres. Lecturers are recruited in BS-17; assistant professors, associate professors and professors can be directly inducted in BS-18, BS-19 and BS-20 respectively according to a quota for direct inductions.

The HED official said that the last requisition, sent to the PPSC in 2012, requested 3,000 lecturers for various disciplines and 2,700 lecturers were recruited on recommendations of the commission.

The official said last year, the department had hired 6,000 teachers as College Teacher Internees (CTI), for one academic session. They were offered Rs30,000 per month to teach for one academic session.

He said teachers from other colleges were posted to the newly built colleges but no new inductions were made, even though the budget had a provision for fresh recruitments.

The HED official said several lawmakers had pushed the government to set up degree colleges in their constituencies but had not paid attention to the recruitment of faculty.

Zulfiqar Ahmed, an associate professor at a private university, said thousands of students had completed their master’s, MPhil and PhD degrees from public colleges in the province over the last five years. “They could have been appointed to these positions,” he said

HED Secretary Muhammad Aslam Kamboh said principals had been authorised to recruit faculty under the CTI programme as a stop-gap measure. He said the department was currently working on documenting vacancies against subjects and colleges to send to the PPSC for recruitment. “This will barely take two weeks,” he said. Staff would be recruited in all scales under the direct induction quota, Kamboh said.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 10^th, 2015.