IIT Professors on mass leave for pay hike

Hundreds of faculty members of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) Bombay and Roorkee went on mass casual leave Monday to protest disparities in pay. Their peers in Delhi will follow suit Tuesday. "The pay hike given by the government is at least 30 percent less at the lower level (of faculties) and at higher level it is 40 percent less than what we had asked for. It will be difficult for us to attract good faculty members," Saumya Mukherjee, professor at IIT-Bombay, told reporters. Holding placards, the professors came out of the IIT-Bombay campus in a long line. They said that to become a professor at any IIT, a student needs to have a PhD, which involves around six more years of study. This entails loss of income. Had they taken up a government job, they would have earned at least Rs.2.3 million, they claimed. Meanwhile, IIT-Delhi professors have said they would be going on a mass casual leave Tuesday to protest the same issue. There was a meeting of all IITs in Chennai Sunday.