TISS professors and students boycott admission process for 2019

Guwahati, April 1, 2019:

The student body of Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Guwahati has boycotted the ongoing process of admission and interviews on April 1, 2019, alongside 14 faculty members who had taken a mass leave in protest during this time.

The 14 members of the teaching staff out of 25 have been hired and kept on whimsical contracts which have been continually fixed by the TISS administration for the past six years. This is not limited to the teaching staff alone, as the non-teaching staffs of the campus do not have a single permanent employee.

Over the past year, the members have been approaching the Mumbai administration which holds central power but there has never been an adequate response to address the matter. Among these 14 faculty members are department chairpersons and center heads, conveners of various committees, wardens of hostels, etc., while some departments are results of these faculty members’ envisioning. It was only much later today that the boycott has been decidedly halted till the April 3.

The admission process is to go on till the 4th of April, in response to TISS Director Shalini Bharat's delayed addressal of the matter. In her response, she has promised to raise the issue at a GB meeting on April 2 in TISS Mumbai which the Deputy Director of Guwahati campus Kalpana Sarathy will attend as representative.

In a statement released by the protesting students and faculty, stated, “Some of the contractually employees faculty members have been working at TISS Guwahati since 2013. There were verbal assurances given by the then Director of the Institute, more than once, that their job would be regularised, that the period that they were serving would be considered as the probation, and so on. But, in reality, their working condition has only deteriorated ever since. Many faculty members have been forced to leave the Institute since their issues have never been addressed. Those faculty members who have been recruited since then have had to face worse job conditions. Some of them are not even paid according to the pay scale which was promised to them in the advertisement, thus, making their work period as good as useless, as these years will not count as experience for career advancement. Our female colleagues could not even avail maternity leave, because they were given only three months contract. What's more, this issue not only affects the faculty staff but is also engulfing non-teaching faculty staff, right from the janitors and cooks to the technical supervisor of the campus. The issues of this section of the campus staff have been illustrated ahead.”

“Despite all these issues which the faculty members on contract have had to go through, they have not compromised in their commitment to teaching, supervising students, and discharging other administrative responsibilities. All the faculty members on contract have worked despite not even having a letter of employment in their hands. Many of them continue to hold key positions, as Centre Chairs, Convenors of various Cells, Wardens for Hostels, etc. All of these are done so as to ensure smooth functioning of the campus despite no incentive whatsoever for these responsibilities. These are additional responsibilities apart from teaching, supervising, evaluation, exam and admission duties that they anyway have been doing. Most of them have also been instrumental in designing, developing the courses and programmes that the campus offers. In some Centres, there is not even a single permanent faculty member,’ it added.

These concerns of job security, regularisation of the job, better working condition have been raised repeatedly in the past. These have been raised not only for individual reasons but to contribute to ensuring the sustainability of the TISS Guwahati campus.

In response, the faculty members on contract have had to face only humiliation. There has been more than one instance in which their salaries have not been paid on time. In almost every instance, they were not even informed about the impending delay in advance. Whenever the issue of regularisation of the job has been raised, the response has been one of the platitudes, and verbal assurance without any concrete offer, as stated in the release.

All of these concerns have been shared to the other faculty colleagues so as to contribute to the smooth functioning of the campus by the contractual faculty staff. The Chairs, Deans, and the Deputy Director felt that planning for the future of the campus cannot go ahead without addressing these issues. This is how a letter was sent to the Director in the first week of February requesting (a) there should be a minimum of 3 years contract period; (b) those on consolidated salary should be immediately given pay scale salary; (c) the increments due to the contract faculty members should be immediately paid.

In addition, there is also the issue, in fact, worse, faced by the non-teaching staff. There is not single permanent non-teaching staff in Guwahati campus. The dining hall staffs are not even given a contract letter. They work overtime without any monetary commensuration. Due to the smaller size of the staff, they have no provision for working in shifts; everyone has to work from early morning to late night, every day. In return, they are paid an abysmally low salary of 7200 per month, which too gets delayed often! This figure is not common for all as some are paid even lesser, while some are burdened by having to take more than one role. These are serious issues, definitely immoral if not illegal, that we have all been complicit in by allowing them to continue without addressing, alleged the students and faculty.

However, after the appeal from incoming students and parents regarding the inconvenienced due to social and financial circumstances, and the Deputy Director’s assurance that she will get the demands approved at the Governing Board meeting on April 2, the protesting students and faculty have decided to wait for the outcome of that meeting. It has been agreed by the faculty members, Deans, Deputy Director, students that in case of failure on the part of the Institute to fulfill the demands by April 2, the Guwahati campus as a collective will not go ahead with the remaining days of pre-interview tests and interviews this week. Till then, the Institute has called in faculty from other campuses to conduct course-specific interviews.