Mumbai: Due to an ongoing faculty crunch at India's premier engineering institutes, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are mooting a proposal to hire foreign nationals as permanent faculty members.

The Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry had, in the year 2006, allowed the IITs to hire foreign nationals as faculty members but only on the basis of contract for a maximum period of five years.

Currently, about a third of faculty positions are lying vacant. This led to a proposal by the IITs to allow foreign nationals as permanent faculty members, as it would help in solving the problem of lack of well qualified teachers.

The proposal for the same will be discussed in the next meeting of the IIT council on Friday. If the proposal is approved, IITs would be able to allot around 10 percent of their teaching positions to foreign nationals on a permanent basis.

As the IITs expand every year, the institutes require around 1200-1500 new well qualified teachers, implying that almost 70 faculty members are needed in one IIT per year. The vacancies for teaching positions were not being filled at the institutes due to very few well-qualified teachers.

An IIT director informed that many qualified foreign faculty members had evinced interest in teaching at the IITs in permanent posts, including several foreign nationals from Eastern Europe.