Hiring of Foreign Faculty by IITs

Today, I came across this Telegraph news item.

This telegraph story suggests that what is limiting the growth of IIT faculty (and that of other central universities) is the rule that no one can get a work permit in India unless his/her salary is at least US$ 25,000 per annum. Wow. I did not know that there is a queue of foreigners lining up to join Indian universities, and if only we are allowed to pay them less than 25K USD, they will fill up all the vacancies, and we can grow and all that.

I would have ignored the article and what it says, if I hadn't heard from some IIT Directors in the past the same lament that if the government could give some foreign professors work visa even if they are paid less than 25K USD, then they can attract foreign faculty to their campuses.

Why does government have this 25K US$ limit. The answer is obvious. The Government wants to protect Indian jobs, and does not want companies in India to hire a whole lot of Chinese and Bangladeshis. It is assumed that the number of jobs at the middle level and higher levels are few. Not many foreigners are interested in coming to India at those levels, and in any case, there is enough competitive talent at that level in the country that one does not expect foreigners to be all over the place.

Is 25K US$ too high, and indeed so high that IITs can not pay this much to their faculty. Let us look at the salary of an assistant professor who is regular employee, that is s/he has completed 3 years of experience after PhD, and completed the contract. The minimum basic will be Rs. 30,000, AGP is Rs. 8,000, DA is Rs. 34,200, HRA (assuming 30%) is 11,400, Transport allowance (including DA) is 6080, contribution to NPS is 7,220, that is Rs. 96,900 per month. Remember, this is the MINIMUM and selection committees can allow a somewhat higher payment. Also, the DA will increase from 1st Jan. 2014 and hopefully the dollar value will remain stable. But let us look at the current figures only. In addition, many IITs pay Rs. 25,000 per month of joining bonus or initial settling down bonus, or whatever you call it. We then have many perks, not the least of which is earned leave, which can be encashed when you resign and go back. The bottom line is that the salary of a young assistant professor with just 3 years of experience after PhD is more than 25,000 US$ a year (and if you feel that the numbers add up to 24,999 $ and not 25,000 $, let me also point out that our boards are allowed to offer higher payments, and we have used this flexibility to offer 25,000 rupees per month to new faculty members, and this number could very well be 25,100 for the foreigners).

I can see that there might be issues in recruiting a foreigner who has just completed his/her PhD, but not others. Also note that these issues have come about only in the last one year with value of rupee vis-a-vis US$ going on a free fall. The issue wasn't there a year ago, and yet our performance in recruiting foreigners last year wasn't quite spectacular.


So the only thing that an IIT needs to do to take care of this lower limit of US$25,000 per annum salary is to give details of all components of the compensation in the appointment letter, monetize the perks, and then offer the total compensation package on so-called cost-to-the-institute basis.

But this will require hard work. One will have to design a new appointment letter, which might take an hour or two of someone's time, and we are all busy doing research.

Even now, if we do not want to do any of this cost-to-the-company stuff, the problem will still be only for people with less than 6-8 years of experience after PhD. How many faculty members have we been able to recruit who have more than 8 years of experience. I must say that the number is close to zero.
Excuses, excuses and more excuses.

Life after Death

This is the last of the three posts that I had planned to talk about my father's demise. The other two are here and here.

The first few days pass by as if you are in a trance. You get up in the morning, and want to inquire about his health. You want to check if he has taken his medicines. But then you don't find him on the bed at the usual location. So you want to ask who shifted him, to which room, why. But before you can actually ask that question, you remember carrying him on your shoulders to the cremation ground.

Of course, morning is the only time when you can think. For the rest of the day, there will be a stream of visitors, same questions, same answers, same advise, same prayers. But believe me, repeating the same stories hundreds of times help you to get normal. Slowly, you start believing that he is really gone for ever. And that realization is the most important first step in the normalization process after death. Also, there is strength in numbers. When a large number of people visit, offer their support and prayers, you feel that your father must have been a great soul, perhaps greater than the credit you ever gave him when he was alive, and you get a sense of pride, the pride of being his son. You also start believing (correctly so in our case) that with all these people willing to help, all the issues will get sorted out soon.

Those issues, of course, relate to things like my father's bank account, pension, PF, medical bills, insurance, and a whole lot more. But to start taking care of those issues, you need a death certificate, and that is when your first interaction with government happens. The Municipal Corporation understands Hindu scriptures better than anyone else. Our scriptures very clearly say that we need a mourning period of 13 days, during which we should not go out of our home, and just talk to the visitors. Compressing this period, as is very common these days in cities, is not good for the near and dear ones, as they would not have gotten out of the shock by then. The municipality ensures that you can do nothing for 13 days by not giving you the death certificate (DC).

Once we had the DC, we made a round of all the offices, collected all forms to be filled in, found out the process, and every bank will have a different process, what all documents we will need and all that. For every account (and each Fixed Deposit is a separate account), one needs to fill up long forms, and attach all sorts of documents about father, about the nominee, about the witnesses, and so on. For each account, one could easily have 20 pages of xeroxed documents.

Father had a habit of keeping all records. There was a list of all accounts, along with account number, financial institution, date, amount, name of nominee, and so on. Every single account had a nominee or it was a joint account. On top of that, he had left a will, properly registered. Thanks to him, we were not anticipating any real problem. It was just the pain of filling long forms, getting a whole lot of stuff xeroxed, and doing it for each account. We could not write down all the accounts in the same form. And then you go to the bank, and they all follow the shortest job first policy of service. Since it will take time to go through all those documents, and check them against the information in their computers, they will look at them only when there are no customers demanding their 2-minutes.  So something that should normally happen in 30 minutes, will take 3-4 hours. So only one institution in one day. Of course, all this because they knew my father. Otherwise, they could ask you to get one more document. We actually would carry xeroxes of all our IDs, photographs, revenue stamps, blank sheets of paper, envelopes, file covers. One never knows what they might ask for.

But there is a goal in all that madness. They want you to forget mourning and become normal. And standing for hours will cause enough pain in your body that you will forget the other pain you had.

Transferring LPG connection was more interesting. There is no nomination facility with the LPG connection. So they wanted an affidavit from my mother on a stamp paper that no other legal heir would claim inheritance of that LPG connection. They also wanted the original document that gas company would have given when the connection was first taken. That was 43 years ago. But my mother was not at all bothered. She knew it must be in the file, and there it was.

The medical reimbursement required the maximum number of documents, and thankfully, for a change, the doctor had to sign more often than my mother. I really felt that doctors should charge extra from those who are going to seek reimbursement from some agency. Instead they charge less.

But now we are stuck. How do we transfer the telephone to our mother's name. MTNL believes that a landline telephone connection from MTNL is an asset, and should have been mentioned in the will. He should have clearly said who shall inherit the connection. MTNL clearly hasn't grown up. It was created in 1986, and it is still living in 1986 when it was entirely possible for the legal heirs to fight over that connection. It took years to get a new connection then. But today when landline customers are deserting them every day, and the connection is available instantly, to still treat the connection as an asset does not make sense.

Of course, we can lie to MTNL that he did not leave a will. At least they won't laugh at him for failing to include such an important asset in the will. But that process is also not very simple. They need a no objection certificate from all legal heirs (that is, all four siblings) that they have no objection to our mother inheriting the MTNL connection. And the problem is that my sisters have gone back to US. At least the Indian Oil (for LPG connection) accepted the affidavit from my mother. MTNL wants it from all of us. Of course, the simpler thing would be to start giving mobile number in all offices, and after a while give up the phone. And during this period, keep paying the bills that come in father's name. MTNL, I am sure, would be happier to have one less landline customer.

Another asset that my father did not list in his will is the water connection from Delhi Jal Board. And they are even less forgiving than MTNL. It is not acceptable to them that the four siblings give a No Objection Certificate. They want a succession certificate from the court. Otherwise, what is the guarantee that there is no 5th or 6th legal heir who may claim to inherit that water connection in future. This is the most ridiculous. With MTNL, one could at least think that while the "connection" per se may not be an asset in today's world, but the "number" could be still important. But with Delhi Jal Board, it is just that someone has to volunteer to pay the bills. And my mother is telling them that after my father, she is agreeing to take the responsibility of paying the bills.

I am sure he is watching us from up there, and kicking himself for not including such important assets in the will. With all his planning, and all his record keeping, he still forgot about them.

My father's education

Yesterday, I wrote about my father's illness and death. Given that this blog readers mostly expect me to write about education, I thought of sharing some very interesting education related experience of my father.

He was a very quiet person, but after his illness, lying on his bed, he loved to talk. He particularly enjoyed remembering incidents and experiences from his early part of life. One day, when he was visiting us at Kanpur, he told me about his education, and it is a rather interesting, though sometimes a sad story.

Our village is only 70 KM from Pilani. My father studied in Birla School, Pilani. In the Inter final exam, there were five subjects, and there were 3 papers in each subject. So a total of 15 exams. (Inter was equivalent to 12th class, but the exam was conducted by a university, and not a school board. In this case, the school was affiliated to Rajasthan University, Jaipur.)

During the exams, he became ill. He somehow managed to take the first 14 exams. But on the evening before his 15th exam, his condition was serious enough that the warden forced him to go to a doctor, and the doctor promptly advised that he be admitted to the hospital. The next day, he pleaded with the doctor to let him take the last exam, even for just an hour, but the doctor was unmoved, and he had to miss that exam. It was Maths III exam, worth 33 marks.

When the results came, the marksheet showed 33/33, 34/34, 0/33, a total of 67 out of 100 in Maths, the first time in his life when he had received less than 100%, and it pained him. But the good thing was that he was in the merit list of Rajasthan University. It was amazing and unheard of that someone who had given only 14 exams was in the merit list.

With this performance, he could have walked into any engineering college. Yes, even in 1950s, there were only two careers which were considered attractive - engineering and medicine. But the village people had only heard of Pilani and Thapar. That Hijli jail had been converted to an IIT was not yet known to the mankind at large. And he chose Pilani. He filled up the admission form, submitted and came back home.

BITS was not yet a deemed university, and it was an affiliated college of Rajasthan University. So its admission was controlled by RU. After a few days when the list of approved admissions came to BITS, there was a shock. My father's name was missing from the list. They immediately sent a man to Jaipur to get the inadvertent error corrected. But he was told that this was not an error. My father had failed one of the 15 exams of Inter, and hence not eligible for admission to college. But if he had failed one subject, and passed all other subjects, then as per rules, he should be allowed to give supplementary exams, and the admission can be given provisionally, subject to his passing the supplementary exam. The engineering admission wing of Rajasthan University was OK with this argument, if the office controlling Inter exams allowed him to sit for the supplementary exams. When this man went to the neighbouring office within the same university, he was told that my father was the topper and how could a topper be allowed supplementary exam.

BITS Director (or Principal at that time) immediately left for Jaipur to meet the Vice Chancellor. He argued with him that the University should make up its mind whether my father was the topper or a failure. One office calling him topper and the other office calling him a failure was not right. If he is a failure then he should be given supplementary exam, and provisional admission. If he is the topper, then of course, he should be given regular admission. But VC could not resolve the issue, and my father did not have any admission, as he had not applied to any other college, and the last date for every program was over.

That BITS would do so much for him really impressed him, and to his last day, he had a soft corner for Pilani. He told me that if he had enough money, he would have asked me to consider BITS Pilani for studying instead of IIT Kanpur.

 

How many of our current academic administrators would do anything to get a good student to their respective colleges. And, by the way, similar stupidities continue till today. If you see IIT JEE (now called JEE Advanced), if you do extremely well in one exam and have good enough marks to get into an IIT, you are still denied admission if you were absent in the second part. If you come to the second part, mark your presence, don't answer even one question, and get a zero, you are eligible for admission, but an absence makes you ineligible. What is the difference between 0 and absence, only IIT Directors know. The story also makes me wonder what would have been his career if the doctor had allowed him to be at the exam for just 15 minutes. Or if he had just casually sent an admission application to Kharagpur or Thapar.

But the story does not end here. It is only the beginning. So if you are allergic to long posts, stop here.

Back in the village, it was obvious that he would have to waste one year, and next year, he could seek admission at Thapar. My grandfather was not happy with the situation, and he thought of talking to the Principal of the local village college to see if he could just attend it for a year. My father wanted admission in no course other than BSc (Mathematics). The college principal had multiple issues. The last date for admission was over. The college only ran BA courses and getting approval for a new program and that too after admissions were closed did not seem feasible. And of course, if at all those hassles could be overcome, who would teach Mathematics in that village. But he was very excited that the topper of Rajasthan University was seeking admission in the village college.

My father made it easy for him as far as the last problem was concerned. He promised that every day during the so-called lecture hours, he would sit in the college library and study those topics himself. The principal was happy to hear that and was confident that this boy would be able to self-study and pass the program. So next day, early morning, he set off to Rohtak, which had a regional center of Panjab University, the one that provided affiliation to the village college. The seniormost administrator at Rohtak looked at the marksheet of my father, and without any delay approved the new program, as well as extended the deadline for admission into this new program. Notice that he wasn't even the Vice Chancellor, for the VC of Panjab University had an office in faraway Solan in what is currently the state of Himachal Pradesh. A lower ranked officer could take such a decision without even a meeting of the Academic Council.

There was critical difference between how Rajasthan looked at education and how PEPSU state looked at education. Rajasthan was just trying to create a reputation of being part of BIMARU states and would do anything to thwart the progress in education. But PEPSU had realized that education would be key to growth in the newly independent India, and there was massive expansion of higher education going on throughout the state. (Of course, that was then. As I have written in some of my earlier blogs, today Rajasthan has amongst the most liberal policies on higher education.) So any college wanted to start a new program and requested more seats, they were easily allowed.

So the principal comes home in the night to deliver the good news that my father could start college from the next day. But the principal had not anticipated some problems when he did all this. The next day, some other kids from village who had taken admission in BA courses, also applied to shift to Mathematics. Now, the principal could not say no to them, but at the same time, he wasn't sure that these kids could pass the courses without a faculty member teaching those courses. And that could lead to violence. They would obviously demand that classes be held, and there was no way that the village college would find Mathematics faculty so soon.

My father solved the problem for him. He would study all Mathematics courses in the evening, and take lectures for all other students in the day time. So at a tender age of 16, he became the de facto college lecturer, of course, without any remuneration. And he really had to work hard for this.

One year went past. Remember, he was expected to apply for admission to Thapar. But he shocked the family by telling them that he was happy studying mathematics and he was dropping the idea of doing engineering. Not only was he deeply interested in maths, but he also felt a responsibility towards his fellow students whom he was continuing to teach.

Three years went past, and he passed the BSc (Mathematics) course with flying colors. He was the topper of the university in the Rohtak zone.

He took admission in the MSc (Mathematics) program at Delhi University. This was a dream place for him. All the great mathematicians whose books he had been reading for the last three years, were there. He could see them, hear them, and even talk to them. If there was heaven on earth, it was here, it was here, it was here. But he had some handicaps. There were some topics which were part of curriculum of BSc in Delhi University but not in Panjab University, and they were assumed as pre-requisites by all faculty members. There were some topics which he wasn't very confident in, since he had received no formal guidance in the last three years. So he had to work extremely hard to perform well overcoming those handicaps. And, of course, first time in a big metro city for a person from village is never very easy. But he worked hard, day in and day out, and when the result came out at the end of the year, he was ranked #2 in the university.

This encouraged him a lot. If with all those handicaps and initial teething troubles, he could secure the second position, now that he was well settled, it should not be very difficult to be the topper. He had heard that the University offered a lecturer position to the topper of the MSc program, and one could do PhD while being a lecturer. Just imagine being the colleague of those Gods of Mathematics. That was a huge motivation and he worked as hard as any human could possibly do. He just had to top the MSc program. But in the process he forgot that to survive, he needed to eat and drink as well.

Just a month before the final exam, he became seriously ill. My grand-father came to Delhi and took him to a doctor. The doctor simply said that his illness is Mathematics. The moment he leaves Maths, he will be alright, and if he does not, he will die. Grand father did not take even seconds to pronounce the judgment. By evening, he had to pack up and leave for village.

My grand father was a good man. He gave a lot of freedom to his sons to take decisions. But, once he had decided something, it was final. You could appeal a decision of Supreme Court, but there was no appeal against his decisions. It wasn't a question of just one month, but it was this whole career plan to study Mathematics for the rest of the life that scared my grand father, and he wasn't going to risk the life of his son for the sake of Mathematics.

Back in the village, my father joined a school as a teacher, and soon started enjoying it. He had enjoyed his stint as a de facto lecturer earlier, and really felt that teaching is his calling. If not at the college and the university level, then let it be at the school level. Soon, he shifted to a school in Delhi. But to get a permanent job as a school teacher, he needed a Master's degree and B.Ed.

He was advised that the easiest subject to pass at the master's level without a bachelor's degree in the subject was History. So he enrolled in MA (History). He admittedly had no interest in the subject. He was teaching Maths in the day and studying history in the night, that too without any passion, and without any background at the bachelor's level. All he could manage at the end was 59% marks in the university exams.

The marks weren't bad for those days. First divisions were rare, and he actually had a decent rank in the university. And most importantly, he could have managed a permanent job with that. But he felt ashamed of getting a second division after such a brilliant academic career throughout. He had to do another Master's degree.

He thought about the subjects that he might enjoy studying (besides maths, of course). In the post-independence India, there was a lot of curiosity regarding the constitution, the form of government, and how everything was supposed to work out. He used to read a bit on these topics. And thus, he decided to do an MA in Political Science, which he followed by a B.Ed., and then secured a job in Delhi Government school system as a Political Science teacher. Of course, through out his years in schools, he had to take all the classes of political science or civics, and in addition the school principal, knowing his background, would ask him to teach mathematics to some class. So he did double duty throughout his career. But he loved teaching so much that he would never mind putting in extra hours for it.