The University Grants Commission (UGC) on Tuesday launched a ‘unified portal’ for recruitment of faculty to central universities, where nearly 31 per cent of the sanctioned positions are vacant, according to the Union Government’s recent submission in the Lok Sabha.

UGC chairperson M Jagadesh Kumar, who launched the portal curec.samarth.ac.in, said both applicants and universities will benefit from it as it will carry a consolidated list of job openings across all central universities and provide a simple interface to apply.

There are 46 central universities under the Union Ministry of Education. Kumar told that the portal will “help UGC hand-hold the universities to fast-track the recruitment process, as it will throw up real-time data on vacancies, applications under consideration, and also track whether the reservation policy is being followed or not”.

Kumar stressed that the portal was not aimed at centralising faculty hiring for all central universities, which will “continue to have their autonomy in the recruitment process”. Some faculty unions had expressed apprehension on this count after Kumar had first floated the idea of the portal in March 2022. However, the central universities have been directed to disband their existing recruitment portals.

“The 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. All the above activities will be carried out through the admin dashboard for each university on this portal,” said Kumar.

On the portal, applicants will find a consolidated list of openings across the central universities, personalised dashboards to help manage the application process. There will be filters such as location, designation, subject, experience and education level, which the applicants can tick to view the openings that suit them.