Being college lecturers / professors in India is already riddled with many issues. University Grants Commission (UGC) is the apex body that controls Universities and college education in India. UGC comes up with the guidelines for eligibility and other rules for the college lecturers keeps changing the rules the way they wish and it causes more problems, than solving the existing ones.
My friends hinted me that UGC has come up with a draft proposal to make rules whereby the criteria for becoming an assistant professor is changed and it no more requires publications and other formalities. The problem here is that the UGC keeps changing the rules and by the time teachers adapt to the rules, the rules will be scrapped.
The changing rules are not only prevalent for the lecturers. It’s a problem for the institutions (universities and colleges) too. Around the year 2017, the NAAC (accreditation body) changed the rules overnight without even giving a hint! If you are a lecturer in a college and know the nightmare of working on a NAAC report, know that this wasn’t so complicated prior to 2017. The problem of this changed rules was that the institutions had conducted events for the past 5 years based on the old NAAC requirements. When the rules were changed, many institutions couldn’t even qualify for the minimum standards. In all this process, lecturers being at the lowest rung of the system are the sufferers. When the rules change, it is the lecturers who have to sit day and night and make new reports.
At one point, it was told that UGC NET is required to become assistant professors. Later, seminar presentations were made mandatory. When a lot of institutions started organising seminars to increase the API score, UGC said that publications will hold more value and seminar presentations have almost no value. When we started doing publications, they said that we should do publications in UGC CARE journals. In many private universities, it is expected that the publications are done in Scopus indexed journals. Once we publish in Scopus indexed journals, again they will change the rules and say that Scopus indexed journals are not valid.
This is basically what I call as “shifting of goalposts”. You set some goals / expectations to the teaching community. And once they are about to achieve them or have put in a lot of hard work to achieve those goals, you invalidate those goals! This way, the system keeps the teachers forever working like donkeys. Even if an assistant professor gets UGC scale salary, it is not great compared to other industry salaries. Most private institutions do not pay exactly UGC scale salaries. With such low standards in salaries, the expectations from teachers is always high! Very unfortunate for the community that imparts knowledge and important for nation building.
This is one more reason why I do not suggest youngsters to get into the teaching profession. The amount of hard work and efforts you put are not even equal to the amount of returns you get in this field. A person doing a post graduate degree after their graduation (2 years); then clear UGC Net exam (6-12 months of preparation); gives up on her health and personal life to do a PhD for 3-5 years; always working on research paper will finally get peanuts! Worse is that these achievements are invalidated later and we are given new goals.
