Punjabi University to streamline workload

Ravneet Singh

Tribune News Service

Patiala, April 16

Punjabi University has decided to streamline the workload for its teaching faculty.

The Office of the Dean Academics wrote to various heads and principals of neighbourhood campuses, regional centres and constituent colleges, demanding the details of workload as per a given format to make provisions for the same in the university Budget.

The development has not gone down well with university’s contractual teachers. This is after the university was directed by the state government to submit the details of the allocation of workload to its teachers due to high honorarium provided by the university last year.

Rs10-crore expense

Dr Pushpinder Singh Gill, Dean Academic Affairs, said the university incurred an expenditure of Rs10 crore in honorarium for the teaching workload in the 2020-21 financial year after which the matter came under the scanner of the state government.

Dr Pushpinder Singh Gill, Dean Academic Affairs, said the university incurred an expenditure of Rs10 crore in honorarium for the teaching workload in the 2020-21 financial year after which the matter came under the scanner of the state government.

He said: “We are streamlining the workload as per the protocol. The university is supposed to approve on the workload for the teaching faculty as per the given process in a Syndicate meeting after it is cleared by the academic review committee. We will then present it to the state government by May 15.”

Meanwhile, the contractual teachers of the university expressed fears that their workload, along with that of lecture-based teachers, will be reduced leaving them with less or no work.

Dr Lovedeep Sharma of the Punjabi University Contractual Teachers’ Association (PUCTA) said: “With workload allocated as per the university’s directions, the contractual and lecture-based teachers will be without work. Also, the university aims at involving senior and junior research Fellows (SRF and JRF) in direct teaching contrary to the UGC rules. They can be involved in tutorials, laboratory work and field work only. This is while the contractual and lecture-based teachers are more experienced than them.”

Responding to the same, Dean Academic Affairs, Dr Pushpinder Singh Gill, said the university did not aim at firing people in the process. “This is aimed at streamlining the process of issuing workload first to most experienced professors, associate professors, assistant professors, followed by to SRF, JRF, contractual teachers and lecture-based teachers in the end as the university’s regular teachers have remained without proper work in the past.”

He said earlier, the university spent Rs82 lakh on honorarium which escalated to Rs10 crore in 2020-21 paid on the basis of workload allocation done by principals and heads of constituent and regional centres.

On the contractual teachers’ concern regarding the violation of the UGC rules, he said: “The terms are devised as per the RUSA guidelines.”

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