Hyderabad: In the prestigious Osmania University, which graduates thousands of students every year, nearly two-thirds of faculty posts are lying vacant. From the total 1,267 faculty positions in all the departments, about 845 posts lay empty.
Which means that this historic institution which empowers thousands of rural and urban students has only 442 faculty.
Of the total sanctioned posts, 158 are professors, 514 are associate professors and 601 are assistant professors. Among these positions, 114 professors, 52 associate professors and 256 assistant professors are currently rendering their services to the university.
One major reason is said to be the retirement of more teachers in the pasy two years, while there were very less appointments. This year, 28 teachers from various departments have retired. In 2021, 19 including 14 professors in 12 departments — Physics, Genetics, Urdu, Political Science, Zoology, English, Hindi, Statistics, Botany, Technology, Chemistry and Bio-Chemistry are slated to retire. Likewise, in 2022, another 20 teachers, including 11 professors, will superannuate.
The present faculty also said that due to a fewer amounts of staff the work on them has increased. Moreover, due to these retirements, there are a few departments which do not have a single professor.
As there are large number of vacancies, the university has employed 387 academic consultants on a contract basis in various departments. Presently, 809 teachers including academic consultants are working with the university.
In fact, the State government had permitted recruitment to 1,061 posts in 11 universities, including OU, Kakatiya University, Telangana University, Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies, Dr B R Ambedkar Open University and Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University-Hyderabad among others. Of these total posts, 450 alone were in OU.
