IIM-A profs want pay on a par with Harvard dons

Vasundhara Vyas Mehta | TNN

Ahmedabad: Quality comes at a cost and the IIM-A faculty members have made it very clear in a memorandum to the HRD ministry on Friday.

The missive comes in response to a notification sent by the ministry on August 20, detailing their salary structure according to the Sixth Pay Commission, which took the wind out of their sails.

The four-member committee that framed the memorandum have quoted Harvard salaries to justify their demand. Designed on the lines of the Harvard Business School, IIM-A is upset that the Sixth Pay Commission has wrested this ‘special status’ from it, so they are demanding bigger pay packets.

The memorandum says that an assistant professor at Harvard gets $140,000 as annual starting pay, equivalent to Rs 23 lakh, and Indian School of Business (ISB) pays over Rs 20 lakh to its APs. Against this, an IIM-A AP gets only Rs 5.5 lakh as starting pay annually.

A major concern of the the IIM-A faculty council is that if institutes of excellence are not given special status, the faculty-student ratio in these institutes could suffer. To retain the ‘top notch’ faculty in the institute they have to be given enough reason to stay. “Till the sixth pay commission, we were given the status of being premier, even though we did not have salaries. But now there is neither,” said a faculty member. One of the recommendations is that the faculties should also get a scholastic pay of Rs 15,000 per month over and above their pay band and grade pay.

The memorandum urges that the pay divide be addressed if these premier institutions are expected to continue to have services of top notch faculty and avert brain drain. “The present notification will worsen the already existing crisis at the entry level AP (assistant professor) position and will cause additional problems at all faculty levels in the IIMs. The following analysis assumes that the HRD ministry would want the IIMs to attract and retain world class academic talent in these premier institutions and to enable the expansion of the IIMs and that the revised pay scales are intended to be a significant contributor to this purpose, says the memorandum.

PAR-FECT SALARY
A Harvard assistant prof gets $140,000 (Rs 23L) as annual starting pay, but his IIM counterpart gets a meagre Rs 5.5L

The IIM-A faculty members want a scholastic pay of Rs 15K per month besides their pay band and grade pay

IIM-A memorandum to HRD