Cambridge univ eyes ties with India

The University of Cambridge in UK is looking to take its engagement with India to a new level, said Vice Chancellor, Professor Alison Richard said on Friday.

The University of Cambridge in UK is looking to take its engagement with India to a new level, said Vice Chancellor, Professor Alison Richard said on Friday.

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On her third official visit to India, Alison visited Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai before making a stop in Mumbai, to conduct “exploratory conversations” with academics, government and private sector partners to scale up the Cambridge-India partnership.

“Our partnership will be focussed on post graduate and post doctoral training and research, mainly in the area of innovation and helping to build innovation eco systems,” said Richard, who will retire as vice chancellor in September. She was appointed as the university’s first woman vice chancellor in 2003 to hold the post full-time.

The university has already signed a memorandum of understanding with the Indian Institute of Technology- Bombay, to allow students and faculty to move between the two institutions. “This is one of the academic threads. We are concentrating on the areas of the sustainable energy, technology and physics. We are trying to bring together Cambridge’s strengths and India’s ambitions and needs,” she said.

There are 236 Indian students studying at Cambridge and Richard pointed out that the number of post-graduate Indian students has doubled in the past five years.

Indian school affiliations to the IGCSE, conducted by Cambridge, have also been rapidly increasing. “India is the fast growing region as far as the IGCSE goes,” she said. It is 10th in terms of countries with IGCSE school affiliations. Mumbai alone has 50 IGCSE-affiliated schools.