IIT Kharagpur, oldest IIT of the country has no director since July 2012, it sounds weird but it’s true. Yesterday entire faculty sat on hunger strike to press for the appointment of a full-time director at the institute.
Members of the IIT-KGP Teachers Association alleged that the appointment of Partha Pratim Chakrabarti for the post of director has been stalled for over an year due to a delay by the CVC in clearing his name.
Mr Chakrabarti has been accused of handing over a Coal India project that was meant for IIT-KGP to an outside agency. CVC is investigating the issue.
Sources say that Chakrabarti was not part of the group that handled the project, nor was he dean of sponsored research when the project was awarded. He was dean when the project was completed and wrote to Coal India that though the project was completely run under the design and direction of IIT faculty members, the codification and dissemination was done by TCG because IIT-Kgp did not have the resources for it.
This has been held against him since the primary condition laid down by Coal India was that no part of the project would be outsourced.
The faculty has written to President Pranab Mukherjee for his intervention. The faculty plans to protest peacefully during the forthcoming convocation of the institute when HRD minister P Raju will be chief guest. However, academic will not be affected by any of these protests, they promised.
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