The Three Dollar Professor: Teaching Ad Hoc in India

by Sahana Ghosh

There was a time in India when a professor’s job was put on a pedestal. University faculty were a revered lot and lived fairly secure lives, earning as much as government executives and not much lower than professionals of similar seniority in the private sector. Be it in the Sciences, Social Science or Commerce, the cream of students aspired to join the academy. They took it in their stride if they were forced to spend years teaching part-time, for fees as low as $3 per lecture until they found their first break of a tenured job.
But all that was before liberalization and structural adjustments that aligned India with the global village. Economic reforms in the early 1990s marked a sharp break with the past in almost all spheres of Indian urban life, not the least in education. Deglamorization of the academic profession–the less-than-competitive salary structures (a part-time lecturer still can earn $5 per lecture at the most, with a ceiling of $222 per month, as University Grants Commission (UGC) has mandated) not being the least important reason–and the lure of the bigger buck in other spheres of professions or that of better academic prospects abroad have meant that the universities today can attract only the mediocre.

The higher education sector in India is huge–304 universities including 62 deemed-to-be universities (which do not get public funding) and 11 open universities, 14,600 colleges, 5,000,000 full-time teachers and 10 million students– hence quite an economic force to reckon with. University education continues to be primarily a public domain. Universities, which have undergraduate colleges affiliated with them, are entirely public-funded–either by the central or state governments–and have to follow norms laid out by the UGC, which though founded as a grants organization has developed to be the quasi-administrator of the entire system.

A lecturer’s job in an undergraduate college was given a premium, and that of an assistant professor’s in a postgraduate university was a bonanza in the heydays of the post-independence quasi-socialism. Teaching jobs were deemed secure, if not really lucrative, carrying little baggage of accountability and responsibility. A university job, cocooned in a unionized atmosphere, was seen as a passport of lifetime security, made all the more cushy with regular salary hikes that the government offered to all government employees through the successive Pay Commissions.

There was no system of on-the-job assessment. Neither were there mandatory research obligations. As early as 1966, the Kothari Commission found universities and colleges “baby-sitting” students. Huge numbers of students went to college not to acquire knowledge, but simply because they had nothing else to do. The parents did not mind, as the university fees were ridiculously affordable and continues to be so even now.

It is no surprise that aspirants for university jobs were aplenty. With hundreds of applicants for each university post, political manipulations and corruption became the rules of the game. Economic liberalization since the 1990s has not changed the basic fabric of the education sphere, but it has induced a partial rethink. Government funds for higher education have been severely slashed, in a bid to control public expenditure, resulting in a freeze on new recruitments. As a result, universities have had to depend on temporary, ad hoc or pay-per-lecture faculty–to the extent of 15 percent of total number of faculty in some universities–to fill the gap left by retiring or on-leave full-time lecturers.

Delhi University, which gets the highest subsidies from the government after Jawaharlal Nehru University and Jamia Millia University, both of which are Delhi-based post-graduate universities, is the most pampered among all universities in the country. Hence, it can afford to recruit ad hoc or temporary lecturers, who are as qualified as the permanent ones having cleared the National Education Test (NET) conducted by UGC, and are paid the same salaries as the permanent faculty, but do not have the security of permanent jobs. Ad hoc lecturers may be paid for vacations as well. Out of the 7,500-strong faculty in Delhi University, 1,000 lecturers are in the nature of ad hoc, temporary or guest (pay-per-lecture). Around 750 are purely on pay-per lecture basis, paid $3 per lecture with a maximum of $222 a month.

However, recruitment of ad hoc lecturers, as well as guest lecturers, is entirely the discretion of the teacher-in-charge of the respective department. So is the payment procedure. Guest lecturers even have to get their monthly salaries recommended by the teacher-in-charge. This means that if the teacher-in-charge is on leave or not present in the campus for some reason, the guest lecturer has his or her pay delayed, perhaps by nearly a month.

On a larger scale, the academic standards of colleges too suffer when departments have to run with part-time faculty. There are colleges under Delhi University, that have been functioning with only ad hoc or guest faculty for seven to eight years. According to Ms. Apala Panda, the teacher-in-charge of Zakir Hussain College, however, it is the responsibility of the teachers’ unions in the colleges to pressure the authorities to recruit full-time lecturers. In her college, for example, “even though it is not one of the top-notch colleges under Delhi University, the strong democratic movement among the teachers has meant there have been regular recruitments in all departments,” Panda says.

While the conditions of non-tenured lecturers in Delhi University are woeful enough, those in other universities are downright pitiable. At Calcutta University in the state of West Bengal, which has been run by a leftist government for the last 29 years, guest lecturers are paid $1.60 per lecture with a ceiling of 10 lectures a week, clearly flouting UGC norms. Some colleges hire lecturers on contracts for six-nine months at $45 per month. Calcutta University employs nearly 5,000 guest lecturers (although the teachers union says there could be another 2,000, as there are no official records), who have no option but to work at such ridiculously low salaries for years. Many college departments continue to run with only guest faculty for years at a stretch. In this university, there is no concept of ad hoc or temporary lecturers like Delhi University has.

The non-tenured lecturers are not entitled for long-term benefits like Provident Fund, Health Insurance, etc. The guest lecturers, or the pay-by-lecture category is the worst off, with no security and much lower remuneration. If the class is suspended for some reason, say for sports or some other activity, the guest lecturer who was scheduled for a class that day has to forego her salary, says Pampa Chattaraj, a part-timer at a Calcutta University college.

Each state government has its particular set of rules in addition to the UGC rules. Typically, most state governments stipulate that the colleges have to give an undertaking for its requirement of part-time faculty, detailing the student strength, expenses incurred and the utilization of the government grants. Most college administrations, however, maintain their accounts rather haphazardly, and are unable to provide the required information. Hence, the colleges have to make do with inadequate faculty or over-worked part-timers.
In some states, the governments have given autonomy to colleges, Tamil Nadu being the first such state. The Kothari Commission recommended in 1966 that at least 10 percent of all university colleges be autonomous. The National Policy on Education (1986) and the Program of Action (1992) echoed the aim. However, the teachers’ bodies have typically opposed moves for college autonomy, fearing that it would erode the parity of pay scales of universities and colleges across the country. According to the plan of the Kothari Commission, there should be 1,600 autonomous colleges today. There are only 140.

While the universities are struggling to make ends meet with reduced subsidies and stagnant student fees (which continue to be at the ridiculously low rates as during socialist times), a changed economic scenario has provoked students, particularly from upwardly mobile middle-class families, to enroll in professional courses, such as management, technology, tourism, etc., offered by private institutes, which charge significantly higher fees. The states of Rajasthan, Uttaranchal, Chattisgarh and Sikkim have allowed private universities to open distance-learning centers all over the country, including in the capital of Delhi. These universities run purely on commercial terms and, in their bid to make as much profit as they can, keep their costs to a minimum.

Strangely enough, while it is the general perception that privatization would improve academic standards, as well as the condition of the faculty, the increase in numbers of private universities has belied expectations. All of these private universities, and their affiliated learning centers, run purely on the strength of guest faculty.

Of course, these institutes, some of which are under the umbrella of UGC and others under the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), pay slightly more than the government universities–about $22 per lecture (of duration two hours compared to one hour in government colleges).

Thus, privatization has not brought any real change in the condition of the part-time faculty for higher studies in India. At the most, it has brought their hourly salaries to the level of call center employees, who do not need more than a high school education!