The University Grants Commission (UGC) on Tuesday launched CU-Chayan, a unified faculty recruitment portal for central universities, aimed at fast-tracking and streamlining the process, as a large number of faculty posts remain vacant each year. The centralised portal will now be the only place where aspirants will have to send their applications, making the process entirely online.

According to the higher education regulator, the portal will allow an enabling environment for both universities and applicants to go through the procedure in an easy and transparent manner.

“Since the launch of the portal, for all the recruitments, applicants have to apply only on the CU-Chayan portal. All the central universities need to deactivate their recruitment portal,” said Prof M Jagadesh Kumar, chairperson, UGC, who launched the portal on Tuesday.

Using backend data analytics, UGC will gather details on how many positions are filled, how many vacancies are there, whether reservations are being followed as per rules, etc. This will help UGC to handhold CUs to fast-track the recruitment process, he said.

As many as 6,028 faculty posts including those of professors, associate professors, and assistant professors are lying vacant across central universities in the country, as per data shared by union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan in Parliament on March 15. The minister had directed these institutions to fill up the vacancies in a mission mode. Last year also over 6,000 posts had remained vacant, owing to a delayed process of recruitment.

There are 56 central universities across the country, of which 10 are under different ministries, as per the UGC website.

What is this portal?

CU- Chayan (https://curec.samarth.ac.in/) is a unified recruitment portal, designed and developed specifically for faculty recruitment in central universities. It makes the recruitment process completely online starting from application to screening with alerts to all the users of the portal.

“Universities will be driving all the stages of recruitment independently, as is being done at present in the respective universities. The portal provides a common platform for listing of vacancies/advertisements/jobs across all these universities,” Prof Kumar said.

Some of the prominent features of the portal include a single applicant login, real-time tracking of application, personalised dashboard for each applicant, admin dashboard for each university/department, built-in email communication tool, online feedback/reference for applicants, and real-time analysis and application insights.

How will it help stakeholders involved?

For applicants, the platform offers a consolidated listing of job openings across all participating universities and a single login for applying to any of the universities. “They will be able to access the faculty application process of any CU from this single portal,” said Prof Kumar.

For universities, the platform provides real-time tracking of applications, customised admin dashboards, and configurable advertisement rules. It also enables a completely online process including payment gateways, from initial application to screening. The screening committee of the university can view details of the applicants, points/research scores given by the system, and check the uploaded document against each entry.

Autonomy of universities in filling up faculty positions?

“Using this portal, central universities will continue to advertise the positions, collect online applications, shortlist the applicants, conduct the interviews, and appoint the faculty members as they were doing earlier. UGC will be maintaining this portal for their benefit while it is not a centralised recruitment process. All the recruitments will be done by the respective universities,” said Kumar.

What about current recruitments?

“Current recruitments for which advertisements have already been issued, will go on without using this portal. However, all future recruitments will take place on this portal while universities can continue giving advertisements in newspapers for filling up vacancies with a link to the portal,” the chairperson added.

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