The Tata Institute of Social Sciences, or TISS, has sacked around 55 teaching faculty members and 60 non-teaching staffers across all its four campuses, reported The Indian Express on Sunday.
This includes half of the institute’s teaching staff and all of its non-teaching staff at its campus in Guwahati, according to the newspaper.
Around 20 of the dismissed teaching staff are from the institute’s Mumbai campus, 15 are from Hyderabad, 14 are from Guwahati and six are from its campus in Maharashtra’s Tuljapur.
Many of them had been working at the institute for over a decade.
“Nearly a hundred institute staff members which were previously funded by the Tata Education Trust will become unemployed after years of service at TISS,” the institute’s Progressive Students’ Forum said in a statement. “It is completely a failure of the current leadership of TISS administration in running the institute and apathy of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union government.”
The employees were reportedly dismissed without prior notice. They received letters of termination on Friday, saying that their contracts – which lapse on Sunday – would not be renewed “in the event of non-receipt of approval/ grant from Tata Education Trust”, reported The Hindu.
The termination letters, signed by officiating registrar Anil Sutar, said: “The institute tried its best for the release of grant from Tata Education Trust for the purpose of salary…through official correspondence and personal meetings…The decision regarding further extension of grant period has not yet been received.”
“While there is no direct communication from the Trust that they are going to discontinue the grants, there is no other communication too,” an unidentified member of the administration was quoted as saying by The Indian Express.
Those dismissed are all contractual employees. The remaining faculty at Tata Institute of Social Sciences are permanent employees on the payroll of the University Grants Commission.
Changes to the University Grants Commission’s regulations last June had brought the institute under the Centre’s administrative purview.
Acting Vice Chancellor Manoj Tiwari told the press that a committee had been formed to discuss the matter with the Tata Education Trust. “If the grants are received, this can be reverted,” he said. “But in case of no change in situation, there is no alternative.”
An unidentified staffer from the Guwahati campus, who is among those laid off, told The Indian Express that their contracts had ended in May.
“But at the beginning of this month, we got an email requesting us to continue with institute work till the Tata Trust funding is renewed,” they said. “There was an understanding that the contracts would be renewed.”
They added: “We haven’t even been given a month’s notice period as stated in our contracts. We have just been given two days to fill a no-dues form to claim our June salaries.”
“We had no inkling that they would not honour the commitment given to us,” another faculty member from Guwahati said to The Indian Express.
The Progressive Students’ Forum has demanded that the institute make arrangements with the Centre and the University Grants Commission to hire the contractual employees who have been laid off.
“While the termination of a hundred such positions will directly impact the futures of the students who are enrolling in the Institute, it might also allow for politically motivated appointments in the near future,” the forum said in a statement.
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