E-Paper
New academic building set to come up on BORI premises
The structure will be the first-of-its-kind academic block with modern facilities, including a fully-equipped modern studio for the creation of more digital content in the future
In a bid to attract more researchers and provide them with better facilities, a new academic building is set to come up on an area of 20,000 square feet inside the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI) premises. The structure will be the first-of-its-kind academic block with modern facilities, including a fully-equipped modern studio for the creation of more digital content in the future. Among other facilities, it will house three big classrooms for the conduct of regular offline courses for the public in different topics by the BORI.
Bhupal Patwardhan, chairman, BORI executive board, said, “We want to reach out to 1 crore people in the next one year for which purpose, we want to make content for 1,000 hours. For this, it is necessary to have a fully-equipped and modern studio to prepare quality content. Soon, the work of a new academic building block is going to start within the premises. Currently, scholars coming for research at the institute sit inside the old building which has limitations with respect to seating capacity. Also, new facilities are needed so we decided to construct a new building, especially for academic purposes.”
“Whereas in this new academic building, there will be dedicated seating rooms for 30 senior scholars and around 30 to 40 junior scholars to carry out research. There will be separate cubicles for senior scholars and two big conference rooms for discussions. Mainly to make online content, the building will house modern, fully-equipped studios and at the same time, there will be three classrooms for offline classes to be conducted with a capacity of 50 students per classroom. We are planning to start regular offline courses from BORI apart from the online platform courses. Earlier, they were occasionally held but we are now planning to take them forward in a new way,” Patwardhan said.
Sharing details of the construction plans of this new building, Patwardhan said, “The building will come up inside the premises on an area of 20,000 square feet, and it is being funded by a private information-technology company. While all permissions required for construction will be taken from our side. The official foundation ceremony will take place in December and it will take at least one-and-a-half years to complete the entire building work.”
Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman had visited Pune on September 21 to inaugurate ‘Bharat Vidya’, an online courses’ platform started by the BORI. BORI has moved its courses across streams such as languages, philosophy, science, arts and medicine to the online platform. Six different courses are currently being offered online, including the 18 Parvas of Mahabharata, Kalidas and Bhasa, Fundamentals of Archaeology, Veda Vidya and Bhartiya Darshanshastra which are all paid courses with fees ranging from Rs1,400 to Rs2,400. While the free online course is on digital Sanskrit Geeta.
