UGC and IIT at Par ? *#$@&*$#

The government is now trying to push through the idea that the amount of work done in IITs is only at par with that done at UGC colleges. That is the reason (as per the government) that IIT and UGC pay scales be the same..Well, may be throw in a thousand or two just to compensate for the 'extra' requirement of a PhD.

It just takes 4 to 5 years for a PhD. Not a long time. A junior faculty in UGC can only earn a mere Rs. 21 lakhs during this time, whereas an institute sponsored PhD scholar would earn a whooping 6 lakhs during the same time. So, the extra two thousand bucks would do to compensate for the pay lost during the PhD period. After all, it would just take a mere 50 odd years to compensate. The average working life of a faculty lasts 35-40 years. Long enough, isn't it?

Now let us have a look at the research output of IITs in comparison with other centrally funded universities. The data has been obtained from ISI Web of Knowledge" , an online repository of publications and related information. The information is for the publications in the past 10 years (i.e., 1999-2009).

Institution	No. of Publications	No. of Citations	Avg. Citations	h-index
IISc	11531	88150	7.64	67
IIT Bombay	9513	58937	6.2	70
IIT Madras	8341	42233	5.06	56
IIT Kharagpur	6953	35040	5.04	51
IIT Delhi	5698	28005	4.91	51
IIT Kanpur	5380	36318	6.75	58
Univ. Hyderabad	4417	28270	6.4	53
Jadavpur Univ.	4106	19620	4.78	43
IIT Roorkee	2255	9186	4.07	37
JNU	1710	9702	5.67	33
Banaras Hindu Univ.	791	6176	7.81	34
IIT Guwahati	531	1857	3.5	16
IIT/IISc Average	6266	37439	5.97	-NA-
UGC Average	2756	15942	5.78	-NA-

Do the figures look comparable by any stretch of imagination. This shows that an average IIT faculty does much more than twice as much research in addition to an equivalent amount of teaching as compared to a faculty in a UGC college. Even an entry level faculty (i.e., Assistant Professor) in the IIT system is expected to be as academically qualified as a Professor in the UGC system. Then where does a comparability come?

I fail to understand.