Listen to this article:

New Delhi: Reserved category faculty positions constitute the majority of reported teaching vacancies across Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), an institute-wise data analysis by Hindustan Times reveals. As India’s premier engineering institutes expand campuses, launch new programmes and increase student intake, the latest figures suggest that the challenge extends beyond an overall shortage of teachers, with reversed category posts accounting for a disproportionately large share of vacancies where caste-wise data is available.

According to the HT analysis, only nine of the country’s 23 IITs provided caste category vacancy data, while the remaining reported only aggregate figures. Across these nine institutes, 888 of the 1,501 vacant positions, nearly 60%, belonged to ‘Scheduled Caste’ (SC), ‘Scheduled Tribe’ (ST) and ‘Other Backward Classes’ (OBC) categories.

A more nuanced breakdown of the numbers shows that OBC vacancies alone made up roughly one-third of the reported vacancies, far exceeding........

© The Wire