It has long been an open secret that engineering colleges ‘share’ faculty members to meet official norms; now there is data to prove it. Official data from eight major States shows that over 90 per cent of engineering colleges have at least one teacher whose name also features on the rolls of another college, and there are at least 50,000 such ‘duplicate’ teachers.
All accredited engineering colleges must submit to the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) the names of their faculty members, and colleges are not supposed to share faculty.
Open data campaigner Rakesh Reddy Dubbudu and his team at the public data website ‘Factly’ downloaded faculty data from the AICTE site for eight States and searched them for duplicates. They shared their findings with The Hindu .
In Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, nearly 8,000 names were repeated across more than one college, Mr. Dubbudu and his team found, which meant that a quarter of the total engineering faculty in the States consisted of duplicate names. In all, nearly 90 per cent of the over 1,500 accredited engineering colleges in the States had at least one ‘duplicate’ teacher on their faculty.
8,000 repeats in TN In Tamil Nadu, over a fifth of all faculty names were repeated and over 8,000 teachers seemed to be working in more than one college. In Maharashtra, over a quarter of all faculty names consisted of repetitions and over 95 per cent of colleges had at least one such ‘duplicate’ teacher. In all, nearly 8,000 teachers in the State were present in the lists of multiple colleges’ faculty lists.
In Uttar Pradesh, over half of faculty names consisted of repetitions, while in Odisha it was 40 per cent. Every engineering college in the two States had at least one such repetition. Over 2,500 faculty members in Odisha and over 8,000 in U.P. were named in multiple colleges.
In Gujarat, over 2,000 teachers’ names were found in more than one college, while in Karnataka had 3,000 such 'duplicate' teachers. Over 97 per cent of colleges in Gujarat had at least one duplicate name while in Karnataka it was over 92 per cent.
AICTE silent Neither the colleges nor the AICTE could offer an explanation. Despite phone calls and an emailed questionnaire, no AICTE official responded to The Hindu’s questions.
Even accounting for the probability of some people sharing the same name, the data, Mr. Dubbudu said, showed that norms were being flagrantly violated. “If people like us can find these trends using data on AICTE website, I am sure it is far easier for AICTE to find this out if they are willing to,” he said. The findings build a case for greater public access to official data, he said.
In Tamil Nadu’s Kanyakumari district, KNSK College of Engineering at Therekalputhoor and NSK Polytechnic College at Chenbagaramanpudur share 11 faculty members. Yet, Dr. K. Thanappan, chairman of the Vellalar Trust running the institutions, says it is a “false allegation.”
(With inputs from R. Ravikanth Reddy in Hyderabad, S. Sandeep Kumar in Vijayawada and R. Arivanantham in Nagercoil)
Published - May 10, 2015 11:28 pm IST
