Maharashtra eases university teacher recruitment norms; academic weightage cut to 60% from 75%

Barely four months after the Maharashtra government notified the common norms for university teacher recruitment, it has changed some of its key provisions aimed at bringing transparency in hiring and raising the bar for candidates.

The previous norms, which were brought at the behest of the state governor's office, had prescribed only 25% weightage for the candidates’ interview performance – a subjective evaluation done by an expert panel – while the candidates’ Academic, Teaching and Research (ATR) credentials – adjudged through quantifiable parameters – carried 75% consideration .

However, under the new rules, the weightage for the academic and research record has been reduced to 60%, with 40% of score allotted for subjective assessment of candidates through two parameters – interview performance and teaching performance, each of which accounts for 20% marks.

The Raj Bhavan, now called Lok Bhavan, had pushed for limiting the interview weightage to only 20% to curb favouritism and corruption in the teacher recruitment, but the state had eventually fixed it at 25%. The changes were notified in a government resolution (GR) on Wednesday.

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Maharashtra University Recruitment: Scoring system

The Maharashtra government has also tweaked the contentious differential scoring system, under which the candidates were to be awarded marks according to the relative position and eminence of their graduating institutes – the highest (100%) score for those graduating from the institutes of national eminence, such as IITs. NITs, IISERs and IIMs, and top 200 foreign universities, 90% score for the candidates from top 100 Indian state and central universities according to the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) or foreign universities ranked 200-500, 80% for other state and central universities and 60% for the remaining University Grants Commission (UGC) approved varsities.

While the amended rules have retained this system, it has replaced the institutes of national eminence with the NIRF top 100 Indian universities and accordingly rejigged the entire hierarchy.

The previous research parameters have also been diluted. Earlier, only the academic papers published in the journals indexed on select databases, such as SciFinder, Web of Science and Scopus, were to be considered for evaluating the candidates’ R&D credentials. Now, this requirement has been replaced with merely “peer reviewed” journal publications.

The teachers had opposed both the provisions arguing that they put the teaching aspirants from marginalised sections at a disadvantage.

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The new norms were approved by the governor Acharya Devvrat, who is also the chancellor of the state public universities , following a request for revision by the state. The government officials believe that the more stringent criteria advocated by the governor would have shrunk the pool of available candidates for the faculty positions lying vacant at the universities.

Maharashtra’s public universities are reeling under large-scale vacancies in teaching positions thanks to the state’s freeze on hiring in the last decade. While the varsities began the recruitment process in 2024, it was stopped in track by the then-governor CP Radhakrishnan, who wanted a more transparent hiring system in place. While the hiring process resumed after the previous norms were notified in October last year, it once again was put in abeyance as the state sought a revision.