IIT Kharagpur plans to triple in size in 10 years
February 4th, 2008
Following are excerpts from a report in Business Standard.
Said D Acharya, director, IIT Kharagpur, “We have lined up huge expansion plans. Being the oldest IIT, our infrastructure is old. We plan to increase the strength of students from the present 7,000 to 20,000. We also want to increase the pool of faculty from 600 at present to 2,000 in the next 10 years. We plan to launch free engineering courses for students and also devise a programme for the training of teachers.”
Following is a quote from an Indian Express report.
In the next five years, the institute plans to increase its intake of students from the present 7,000 to 12,000. By 2017, it plans to increase its strength to 24,000.
While part of me is excited about this development in my alma-matter, I am worried that this will add to the imbalance of higher education spread across India. Earlier IIT Kharagpur had proposed to achieve this expansion by having branch campuses in Kolkata and Bhubaneswar. That would have spread the higher education opportunity across a larger geographical area. But MHRD stopped it and now the plan is to expand in place. This would definitely save some cost but will add to the existing inequity.
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