MPSC Recruitment Drive: A Pain for Candidates!

The mega recruitment drive announced by MPSC for 130 posts in the Fine Arts faculty in Maharashtra seems more of a hurried move than a well thought-through decision. Majority of the applicants are shocked to note that they can’t even qualify to apply. Chinha Art News interacted with some of them to know the ground level realities and the unrealistic eligibility criteria of the recruitment drive.

Are you a Doctorate in Fine Arts having a domicile of Maharashtra, with 10 years of teaching experience, have 10 research publications or 6 research publications and have guided at least two PhD scholars, and currently unemployed? If yes, cheer up, because you are the perfect candidate to become Professor of Fine Arts! The Maharashtra Public Service Commission (MPSC) has recently announced a mega recruitment drive for 130 posts in academics in the Fine Arts faculty in Maharashtra this September, specifying the above mentioned criteria for the post of Professor.

First of all, why a recruitment drive of such magnitude? Well, obviously there are so many vacancies. Isn’t it a good thing that the vacancies are going to get filled? Yes, but why so many vacancies suddenly? Well, not suddenly but it is an accumulation over past several decades or so. But better late than never!

Looking into the finer details, it becomes clear that the eligibility criteria are of the highest standard. It seems to have been adopted from the UGC norms that are supposed to be the standard in the education sector. Fair enough, so what do these standards expect from a candidate to be eligible to apply? For the post of Professor, it mandates a PhD with 10 years of work experience and either 10 research publications in reputed journals. If a candidate does not have 10 research publications, they should have at least 6 publications and should have guided two PhD scholars for their doctoral research.

Similarly, for the posts of Associate Professor and Assistant Professor the eligibility criteria stipulate the minimum educational qualifications, work experience and research publications. So what’s wrong in that? Nothing, really. Offcourse, there can be arguments questioning the validity of asking for a doctorate degree for a teaching job, saying that a research qualification may not always make a better teacher. However, let’s not get into that debate at this time.

What is seen at ground level about this recruitment drive is that, majority of the candidates are finding it difficult to even qualify to apply. To find out why, Chinha team interacted with some of them. Those conversations brought out some glaring facts that limit the possibilities of getting the candidates as per the stipulations and at the same time the chances of deserving candidates getting a full time job seem faint, because of the over ambitious eligibility criteria.

How? Let’s see. To be eligible to apply for the post of professor, the candidate must have 10 research publications. This may seem a valid criterion for any educational post of that stature. Agreed. However, is the Fine Arts education in the state tuned towards regular research publications as the other faculties in the state or elsewhere? The clear answer is negative.

Where do research publications come from? Either from post graduate or doctoral level research projects which are part of the academic programs. Do the academic programs in Fine Arts domain in the state have the research component in their syllabus? Is research publication a mandatory part of the programs? Certainly not.

Looking into the Doctoral research, first of all, How many Fine Arts colleges in the state offer a PhD program? None! Then how can one expect PhD holders from Maharashtra state to be available in large numbers? On top of that, this mega recruitment drive is specifically to recruit the candidates who hold a domicile of Maharashtra state. That effectively means that it is looking forward to recruiting someone from Maharashtra, who would have taken the pains of moving to another state for doing Ph.D. in Fine Arts, and who would have published 10 research papers over time, would have had 10 years of work experience, would have come back to Maharashtra and at the end of all this, is still unemployed!

All this while, while analyzing and visualizing this scenario in a practical sense, we are not even considering the age limit criteria stipulated for each of the posts. But if one looks into that too, it becomes much more difficult to hope that such candidates in such numbers would be available and are still unemployed.

Then, how come a state level recruitment drive such as this hopes to find such candidates? Or does it not, really? The candidates hoping to get recruited through this drive also shared that similar drives have been conducted at least twice in the past wherein only the application process happened, and the actual recruitment process never happened. Clearly, it was just an exercise to collect the application fees from thousands of hopeful candidates, by showing them the carrot of a government job.

There is another dimension to this. It is a universal tendency among the recruiters to ask for higher qualifications or experience level than what the job description entails. It is based on the sad fact that at any given time, there are highly qualified candidates who are still unemployed. That gives confidence to recruiters that they can ask for more and would certainly get it. This leads to such overconfident recruitment policies. Every reader of this article can relate to their own experiences in this context and recollect examples from any industry, as this is a universal fact.

More than anything else, this recruitment drive with such specifications reflect on the tendency of the bureaucracy. They won’t look into the ground realities before issuing any such advertisement. Nobody would get into the finer aspects of what is the need of the sector and what is the availability and therefore what is the gap in terms of the human resources. What are the skill sets that are required to bridge the gap and who would do that and how? All such thinking can’t be expected from the bureaucracy. For them, it is easiest to copy the highest standards stipulated by UGC.

It is beyond doubt that in order to develop good educational institutions, we must adopt the highest standards. However, with no background of research publications / PhD etc currently seen in the Fine arts education in the state, what is really needed is that there has to be someone senior from the Fine arts community who would advise the government on what criteria and parameters are necessary while recruiting. Simply copying from UGC won’t work.

Vineel Bhurke