Staff crunch hits academic prospects

Visakhapatnam: The delayed recruitment of assistant professors is hurting the academic prospects of students at state-run universities. All universities have been facing a staff crunch for years. Now, even six months after the GO was released for filling these vacancies, the process has not made any headway as the modalities of the recruitment have not been finalised.

The state government has itself set a target to recruit 1,104 professors, assistant and associate professors in 2016-17. Other than giving a nod to posts through university-level committees a few days ago, the officials have not taken any call on the recruitment of assistant professors. In the 1,104 vacancies, 846 are for assistant professors. Earlier, the state government had formed a committee, comprising former vice-chancellors of various universities to visit all state-run varsities and study the admission, academic, research and other pedagogical requirements in terms of faculty positions and vacancies in 2015.

The team of former VCs, including Prof. C.V. Raghavulu, Prof. C.R. Visweswara Rao, Prof. R. Madhavi, Prof. A. Rama Rao and Prof. V. Venkaiah, suggested a common screening test. Initially, the state government had contemplated going for a central recruitment mechanism through Andhra Pradesh Public Service Commission, citing the undue favouritism and malpractices that took place in the earlier recruitments at varsity-level recruitment.

Later, the proposal of ‘consortium of universities’ to conduct the common test had surfaced. But the state government is yet to decide what modality to adopt for filling these posts. APPSC chairman Prof. P. Uday Bhaskar informed that they did not get any proposal from the government regarding common recruitment test for professor posts. “As of today, we do not have any information from the government about the common recruitment through APPSC,” Prof. Uday Bhaskar said.