83% faculty posts vacant at Suravaram Pratapa Reddy Telugu University

Several Telangana universities are facing a severe shortage of regular teaching faculty, with large numbers of sanctioned posts lying vacant. The crisis has forced departments to depend on academic consultants and retired teachers, raising concerns over university rankings, accreditation, PhD supervision and research.

Hyderabad: Suravaram Pratapa Reddy Telugu University, which was founded to preserve, develop, and propagate the Telugu language, literature, culture, and history, has no regular faculty in its Telugu department. For the past several years, the university has been functioning with retired Telugu teachers who have been brought back as academic consultants.

In fact, the Telugu department is not alone with such an issue. Several departments, including Astrology, Folk Arts, Music, and Linguistics, have been operating without professors, associate professors, and assistant professors for the past several years.

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As per the information available with the Higher Education Department, the university has no professors in any of its departments, while there are 12 assistant professors and one associate professor on the varsity rolls only. Of the 77 sanctioned posts, the university has 64 (83 per cent) vacancies.

Similar is the predicament of 10 other Universities in the State. Osmania University, which is one of the oldest universities in the country, has 74 per cent vacancies out of 1,267 sanctioned posts, while Kakatiya University, with a sanctioned regular faculty of 409, has a staggering 332 (81 per cent) vacancies. As many as 117 out of 136 sanctioned posts in Palamuru University have been lying vacant for the past several years.

Given the dearth of regular faculty, several OU departments, including Archaeology, French and German, are run only by academic consultants, who are employed on a contractual basis. Departments such as Journalism, Sanskrit, Philosophy, Arabic, Islamic Studies and Kannada are also struggling to operate.

The teacher cadre 1:3:6 (professor, associate professor, and assistant professor) ratio in almost all the universities has taken a heavy beating due to retirements and no fresh recruitment for several years.

OU former Vice Chancellor Prof T Tirupati Rao expressed concern that a decline in the teacher-student ratio could affect university rankings. The dearth of regular faculty could also have an impact on NAAC grading, PhD supervision and research activities, he added.

University	Sanctioned posts	Vacant posts	Vacancy (%)
Osmania University	1,267	936	74
JNTU	410	266	65
Kakatiya University	409	332	81
BR Ambedkar University	93	69	74
Telugu University	77	64	83
Telangana University	152	91	59
Mahatma Gandhi University	70	35	50
Palamuru University	136	117	86
Satavahana University	63	47	74
JNAFAU	55	41	74
RGUKT	146	127	86