I wonder how many scientists will be leaving for China and India where they’ll be worshiped.
The offers do get made.
Will IITs, IIMs fall victim to poaching by foreign universities?
MUMBAI: In 2008, when Atlanta-based Georgia Tech University bought 250 acres of land in Hyderabad it left many gaping. It did something even more astonishing shortly afterward: it invited its own faculty members to quit their jobs and consider moving to India.
A professor in the computer science department of the university told TOI: ‘‘Each one of us got a formal note. Even more amazingly, he added, all of us were offered the same salary that we were getting in Georgia. It was clearly an offer very few would even think of refusing; given the cost of living in India, it would straightaway translate into a fortune, if not a killing.’’
The note read, ‘‘Those who take a transfer to Hyderabad, or are recruited for the India campus, will be offered the same dollar salary compensation that is paid in Georgia.’’
This is not a unique case though. Quite a few American and European universities, which have plans of setting up a campus in India, have sent out similar messages to their teaching staff.
With the government paving the way for foreign universities to set up campuses in India, it can only mean one thing: poorly-paid academic superstars of the country’s top institutes can finally expect to get value for their worship. In other words, lowly-paid teachers will be poached.
Three American academics L Rumbley, I Pacheco and Philip Altbach, who drew up a chart, found that Saudi Arabia paid its professors the highest on an average —$6,611, followed by Canada at $6,548 and United States at $5,816 per month. India, on the other hand, pays only — $1,547.
S Biswas, dean of academic affairs at the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay said, ‘‘I gave up a high-paying job in the US and came to teach here. A lot of us will not merely join a foreign university for the pay. The university has to have a complete environment: from bright students to well equipped labs, to high end research facilities to independence that they will give professors.