The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) here will make offshore recruitment of teachers to improve its standard.
“We will visit the UK, the US, and Canada from May 23 to June 12 for interviews to select the best teachers from the Indian diaspora and try to bring them back,” IIT-Ropar director Sarit K Das told HT. The scouting team will have experts from IIT-Roorkee; Central Power Research Institute; and the Indian Institute of Science (IISC), Bengaluru, as well on board.
Das said IIT-Ropar would double its student-and-faculty strength in 18 months, and take it to 2,400 and 250, respectively, by 2020, besides having 10 teaching departments by then. “It is a difficult task but we will do it,” said the director, satisfied by the 9th all-India rank of this IIT in the 2016 survey by the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) and the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). “To break into India’s top 10 engineering institutes is a big achievement for any new institute,” he said, adding: “We aim at being in the top 5 research and teaching institutes now.”
IIT-Ropar, he said, would also help the region’s engineering colleges grow. The institute will help its associate colleges with student internship, faculty training, and field research. Das claimed that its new 500-acre campus will be ready by next summer and, later this year, it will start moving its departments from the transit campus. “We’ll have a B-Tech civil engineering programme from the next session, besides chemical engineering and biomedical technology courses from 2017,” he said.
M-Tech in computer science and electrical engineering are new programmes coming up in the next academic session. In quality of research, said Das, the Ropar campus was ahead of many other IITs, since it selected its focus areas (agriculture, health, defence, manufacturing, and skill development research) based on national and state interests, existing facilities, international trends, and usefulness. “These focus areas will help address the local problems of the state, by giving it better irrigation, fertilisers, and cancer research, and taking care of the needs of the state industry,” said the director.
{{/usCountry}}M-Tech in computer science and electrical engineering are new programmes coming up in the next academic session. In quality of research, said Das, the Ropar campus was ahead of many other IITs, since it selected its focus areas (agriculture, health, defence, manufacturing, and skill development research) based on national and state interests, existing facilities, international trends, and usefulness. “These focus areas will help address the local problems of the state, by giving it better irrigation, fertilisers, and cancer research, and taking care of the needs of the state industry,” said the director.
{{/usCountry}}This IIT also received `5 crore from the Centre for building a technology business incubator in Punjab to contribute to the ‘Start-up India’ programme. The institute will hold Industrial-Academia conclave and ‘Start-up’ Day on May 9 and 10.