NEW DELHI: In a bid to bridge the gap in the quality of education provided in institutes in states like Bihar, UP, Rajasthan and Orissa, the HRD ministry has hired over 1,200 fresh postgraduate and post doctoral students from IIT’s and IISERs are faculty members for government engineering colleges in these states.According to union HRD minister Prakash Javadekar, this initiative has been taken as part of the World Bank aided Technical Education Quality improvement Project (EQUIP-III) that focuses on the upliftment of education in backward states. The 1,225 faculty members will be posted on a contract basis for three years and will be placed across 53 institutes in 11 states.”There was a deficit of nearly 60 per cent faculty members in these institutes. This will help improve the quality of technical education imparted to students at these institutes in remote areas,” Javadekar said. The government will spend nearly Rs 375 crore on this initiative, the minister said.”We received applications from over 5,000 students who were mostly fresh M.tech graduates or post doctoral candidates. They have joined these institutes as part of their own aspirations to do something good,” he said.As per the data provided by the ministry, Rajasthan has received the maximum number (301) of faculty members. This was followed by Bihar where 32 have been hired for Gaya Engineering College in the state and 27 for Mazaffarpur.