JNTUH issues notices to 80 engineering colleges in Telangana over faculty shortage

Hyderabad: The Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University-Hyderabad (JNTU-H) has issued notices to over 60% engineering colleges in the state for not having the required faculty or infrastructure, with days to go for the commencement of a fresh academic year.While there are 134 colleges under JNTUH, over 80 of them were issued notices in the first week of June and were asked to submit their response within 30 days. Notices were sent after fact-finding committees (FFC), which visited colleges as part of the affiliation process, found various deficiencies including faculty shortage.“We issued notices to colleges with deficiencies last week following an inspection by FFC teams. Many did not have the required faculty,” said a senior official from JNTUH.As per the AICTE norms, colleges will have to maintain a faculty, student ratio of 1:20 for most B Tech courses. However, many colleges are said to have a shortage of faculty. Interestingly, several colleges have sacked some faculty after FFC inspections in May.“Now, many colleges have released job notifications and are hiring faculty at various levels. Unfortunately, this is just going to be a stopgap arrangement as they fire faculty immediately after affiliation is granted. The govt must come up with a permanent solution to ensure that faculty are not at receiving end and also to maintain education standards in the state,” said A Santosh Kumar, president, Telangana Schools Technical Colleges Employees Association, adding that as many as 86 colleges have been issued notices by the varsity this month.Faculty members said it is unfortunate that such a large number of engineering colleges in the state are running without required faculty.College managements, meanwhile, confirmed that many of them received notices.“Out of around 80, as many as 47 colleges were found to have serious deficiencies. Some of them even had over 50% vacancy in faculty posts. Others had minor deficiencies like pending common service and affiliation fees or one or two faculty posts vacant,” said a member of Federation of Associations of Telangana Higher Institutions (FATHI).