1,200 faculty in rural engineering colleges will lose jobs by month-end

A World Bank funded project to take graduates from elite institutions to rural and remote engineering colleges in poorer States is coming to an end in March, leaving more than 1,200 assistant professors out of a job and some rural colleges bereft of half their faculty. The Centre is preparing its own MERITE project with some similar objectives to improve technical education, but that may be too late for the faculty employed under the current project. Tanmay Rath holds a Ph.D. in polymer chemistry from IIT Kharagpur, with post doctoral experience in nanomaterials research in eastern Asia. However, for the last three years, he has been engaged in a project teaching chemistry to undergraduate engineering students in Motihari, a small town in Bihar’s East Champaran district.