IMI Bhubaneswar has now received approval for its PGDM program with an initial intake of 60 students. It also has now hired Prof. Somayajulu Garimella as its director. Its web page is revamped.
2 comments June 20th, 2011
Following are excerpts from a report in ibnlive.com.
… The Ministry of Human Resource Development held a meeting with the representatives of IITs, including the eight new ones, in Delhi on Thursday.
… Like its counterparts, the Bhubaneswar institute too is behind the schedule and unlikely to meet its 2013 deadline given the existing pace of work. With problems of land acquisition and transfer, the IIT Bhubaneswar has been able to construct only boundary walls measuring about six km. …
Sources said that IIT Bhubaneswar would submit a report to the Ministry detailing its bottlenecks about land transfer, forest land conversion, acquisition of private land and infrastructure like road, power and water.
With the slow progress raising hackles, the IIT has decided to hasten establishment of its campus at Arugul, about 25 km from here. Works estimated at 30 crore will soon be taken up with two-phase tenders.
The first tender will be scheduled in July and include works such as roads inside the 935-acre campus, sewerage and site development. The second tender will be floated around December for construction of buildings.
… Most of the new IITs, sources said, sought that new project proposals be chalked out since the 12th Plan is only three quarters away and the project costs will stand revised at the current prices. The IIT Bhubaneswar was earmarked 760 crore, half of which is towards infrastructure.
The sources further said that each of the new institutions is likely to cost close to 1,400 crore for which funding proposals will have to be placed in the 12th Plan.
June 18th, 2011
Following are excerpts from the Economic Times article.
The IITs have completed 50 years and have helped build India. They were set up for producing high quality technical human capital for India and have met their objectives. But, as is the character with such institutions, they have not changed with the times and are not providing India with what she now needs.
… The IIT boards and the directors are unable to take any financial decision which they deem fit without the approval of the government . Even for an overseas travel of the director or the faculty, permission is needed. They are subject to austerity measures of the government, a perfect situation to emasculate an educational institution.
The demand for an IIT seat is enormous and has spawned a tutorial industry that earns more revenues than the IITs themselves. This has resulted in large number of students spending up to two years of their youth going to cramming schools learning pattern recognition, forgetting the art of thinking and problem solving knowing that their lives are made once they get entry into the hallowed portals. Today about 60% or more of the intake is from the coaching mandis. This has also resulted in many bright young Indians deciding not to undergo the ordeal and go overseas for higher education. 250,000 of them study overseas, over 110,000 in the United States, about 45,000 in the UK spending about $ 6bn on fees and costs annually …
Overall , the 15 IITs graduate 7000 undergraduates, 6000 post graduates and about 1700 PhDs annually . Sadly only about 2% of the undergraduates go on to their masters and PhD in the IIT system. The IITs hold fast to the idea that by squeezing input they can get a quality output, an idea that has been consigned to the dustbin of history. Increasing the scale and size can give them the diversity of talent, the resources, the ability to have more quality faculty and the depth and width needed for an elite educational institution.
… the IITs will live in their ivory tower and possibly become less and less relevant to India’s need as neither are they meeting India’s need for more human capital nor producing the kind of PhDs India needs.
… The best solution is to open up the education system and allow competition, the dreaded word in academics, to come forth. India should revise her educational policies and allow the private sector to set up "innovation universities" granting them all that they need. Full autonomy, academic, administrative and financial to chart their own future. Some safeguards are needed, as this is a public good. A large corpus of say Rs 100 crore, an open merit based admission policy, a faculty compensation policy based on minimum UGC scales and an assurance that they will aim to be amongst the top 100 in the world over the next 25 years. To ensure access to the merited we need a national scholarship scheme which will fund students. India needs to trust the genius of her citizens to create institutions that are world class and not look at them through myopic eyes with suspicion.
… Today there is a flight to quality. The bad colleges are dying since students have a choice, they are voting with their feet. The good ones are expanding and seeing greater demand. The market mechanism has worked, not by design but by serendipity. So there is hope. Look at various other sectors today. Bharti has made BSNL redundant and has given us a choice, Jet has overtaken Air India and given us a choice, the power system in Mumbai is still the best, and in education the Indian School of Business has turned our IIMs inside out. The IIMs actually want reform, expansion and are concerned about their future .
Competition and an open liberal environment for higher education will work .
I agree with most of the points made in the article and its arguments buttress the need for early approval of universities like the proposed Vedanta University.
One point where I disagree is the suggestion that 100 crores is a large corpus. If the goal is to be in the top 100 in the world, a corpus of 100 crores is very little. That is only 20-25 million USD. In comparison the corpus of Harvard and Stanford are of the order of 25+ Billion USD.
June 16th, 2011
June 15th, 2011
June 14th, 2011
The web page of this college is at http://sicc.in/. Its founder is the person who established the well regarded Sai International School in Bhubaneswar. Based on that, I am hoping that this will be a good college and will fill the lacunae of a good commerce college in Odisha, especially in the Bhubaneswar-Cuttack area. At one time the commerce program at Ravenshaw was ranked, but that was a long time back. I hope the commerce program in this college gets national ranking and other institutions in Odisha (especially the private ones like KIIT and SOA) get inspired by this to start their own quality commerce programs. While there is a plethora of colleges (several of them quite good) in the Bhubaneswar area for pursuing an MBA, there has not been any top-notch (i.e., nationally ranked) colleges for B.Com.
Following is an ad for this college and pages from its brochure.
1 comment June 13th, 2011
Its web page is http://iiysar.ac.in/.
June 13th, 2011
The following is from http://www.telegraphindia.com/1110611/jsp/orissa/story_14097481.jsp.
June 11th, 2011
Following is an excerpt from a report in Daily Pioneer.
… the State Government on Monday decided to set up a Construction Skills Training Institute (CSTI) in Bhubaneswar under the Odisha State Employment Mission scheme.
The L&T group has evinced interest for the mega training institute to be set up in the PPP mode in the infrastructure development sector and the negotiation is in an advanced state, said Chief Secretary Bijay Patnaik, adding that the Government would provide the infrastructure support to the L&T.
He said that besides the main campus to be located in Bhubaneswar, the institute would have three sub-centers in the tribal areas, one each at the district headquarters of Koraput, Kandhamal and Mayurbhanj. The sub-centers would act as feeder units for the main CSTI, Bhubaneswar. The concerned district Collectors have already been directed to identify suitable sites for the sub-centers.
The Bhubaneswar institute will be located at the Industries Department premises in the Sailashri Vihar area. Training will be imparted in construction-related trades like masonry, bar bending and carpentry. Training will be meant for school dropouts and the training period will be three months. The training and lodging will be free of cost and L&T will extend stipend of `2,000 per month. According to sources, since the training programme is placement-linked, L&T will offer placement in its own construction sites both within the State and outside.
The Chief Secretary also said after a high-level meeting on the activities of the State Employment Mission held under the chairmanship of Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik that it was decided to provide skill development training to an estimated 10 lakh unemployed youth during the next three years under the Employment Mission.
He said a number of sectors like retails, housekeeping, food and beverage, customer relations, front office management, telecom sales, driving, computer and photo shops, nursing and debt recovery agents would be taken up for skill development.
Meanwhile, on the request of the State Government, the National Skill Development Corporation has agreed to undertake skill mapping in order to identify the demand-driven sectors with special emphasis on an in-depth study in tribal areas.
1 comment June 8th, 2011
A committee under the chairmanship of Dr. Anil Kakodkar has circulated a report (see also here and here) with the above name. Following is an input that I hope to send to the committee.
My suggestion is that the IITs combine the idea of free seats and paid seats that is used in many state engineering colleges with (some aspects of) the idea of honors colleges used in many universities in the US.
This means, for any discipline or program, there would be some number of seats (say between 20-40) for a "Research-Honours" program. The students in this program will be required to be involved in research all through their 4 years. Starting from second year they would be part of the research lab of a faculty and each semester they would have to sign up for research credits (and do research) whose grade will be based on research done by the students. Each class from the 4th semester onwards would have research component where students would have to go beyond textbooks and read latest papers on that topic. The students would be required to publish in a good international conference or journal before they graduate. During the summers they will be required to spend time in research labs. In general these students would be motivated and prepared for research careers as is being done in the IISERs and NISER. For these students the fees will be minimal and they may be even given scholarships like the INSPIRE scholarship. To remain in the "honors-research" program the students would have to maintain a required grade point average.
The rest of the students would be in regular programs (as they exist now) and would be required to pay more substantial fees, similar in amount to what the Kakodkar committee recommends. (Based on their academic performance some of these students may be allowed to change over to the "honors-research" program after the end of first year or perhaps even later.)
The above idea may be implemented at NITs too, may be with lesser number of seats in the "honors-research" program.
This will address several issues mentioned in the Kakodkar committee report.
The rationale behind the fees difference is fairly obvious. The "research-honors" students have a high chance of pursuing research in their chosen fields and that is the current need of the nation. On the other had the other students, as evident from the current trend, are less likely to pursue careers in their own disciplines (except the ones in electrical/cs/it/electronics areas) and many are likely to go for management and other careers. Since that is not the core goal of the IITs, these students need not be subsidized. Loans and other mechanisms need to be in place so that everyone who can get admitted to a program is able to find the money for the fees.
The above is a bare-bone idea and needs to be flushed out with more details. One may look at how honors programs are administered in many US universities to flush out some of the details. See for example Barrett Honors College (ASU).
June 7th, 2011
I really liked several things in it.
(i) The academic part where the various school are connected through a common corridor curving around the auditorium complex and then jut out in some what of a radial manner. This allows faculty of different schools to run into each other and foster inter school collaboration while still giving unique identity to each school. The path from the hill top to the auditorium to the academic complex is very pretty,
(ii) The green between the hostels and residential places is also a very nice feature. I assume those hostel would be for doctoral and post-doctoral scholars, some with families. (The hostels closer to the academic complex will probably be for the undergraduates and masters students.) Those greens will create a very collegial campus and off-hour interaction between the faculty-staff families and families of doctoral/post-doctoral scholars.
On the other hand, the colors (yellow and light brick) and the paucity of big trees make part of the campus look very hot. The walk through of the residential area make it look like a typical government colony. While the academic buildings are made 6-7 stories tall, the residential buildings seem to be only 3 stories. Highrises would have saved more land for the future. I hope they use a more pleasing color combination and have more fast growing and colorful plants such as various palm trees and bougainvillea. If funding is a concern, with the help of the Odisha government, they should rope in some corporate houses to make the campus look even prettier.
June 6th, 2011
The page at http://mohfw.nic.in/showlink.php?id=698 documents the progress of the various AIIMS-like institutes across the country and as one can find out the progress is the least with respect to AIIMS-like institute in Bhubaneswar. That is a shame.
A bigger shame is that many other states have managed to get approval for additional AIIMS level institutions while Odisha, despite our many emails to the CMO, has not tried that. Odisha should push hard to get both MKCG and VSS Medical colleges upgraded to the AIIMS level.
Following is a list of what has so far been approved obtained from pages 3,4,6 and 8 of the document at http://mohfw.nic.in/showlink.php?id=698.
| Phase 1 | Phase 2 | Phase 3 | Total | |
| Andhra Pradesh | Upgrade NIMS Hyderabad; Upgrade VIMS Tirupati | 2 upgrades | ||
| Bihar | New AIIMS-like (Patna) | Upgrade GMC Darbhanga; Upgrade GMC Muzaffarpur |
1 new 2 upgrades |
|
| Chhatisgarh | New AIIMS-like (Raipur) | 1 new | ||
| Gujarat | Upgrade BJMC Ahmedabad | 1 upgrade | ||
| Haryana | Upgrade PBDPIMS Rohtak | 1 upgrade | ||
| Himachal Pradesh | Upgrade GMC Tanda | 1 upgrade | ||
| J & K | Upgrade GMC Jammu; Upgrade GMC Srinagar | 2 upgrades | ||
| Jharkhand | Upgrade RIMS Ranchi | 1 upgrade | ||
| Karnataka | Upgrade BMC Bangalore | Upgrade VIMS Bellary | 2 upgrades | |
| Kerala | Upgrade GMC Thiruvanthapuram | Upgrade GMC Kozhikode | 2 upgrades | |
| Madhya Pradesh | New AIIMS-like (Bhopal) | Upgrade GMC Reba |
1 new 1 upgrade |
|
| Maharashtra | Upgrade GMC&SJJGH Mumbai | Upgrade GMC Nagpur | 2 upgrades | |
| Odisha | New AIIMS-like (Bhubaneswar) | 1 new | ||
| Punjab | Upgrade GMC Amritsar | 1 upgrade | ||
| Rajasthan | New AIIMS-like (Jodhpur) | 1 new | ||
| Tamil Nadu | Upgrade GMC Salem | Upgrade GMC Madurai | 2 upgrades | |
| Uttaranchal | New AIIMS-like (Rishikesh) | 1 new | ||
| Uttar Pradesh | Upgrade SGPIMS Lucknow; IMS Varanasi | New AIIMS-like; Upgrade JNMC Aligarh | Upgrade GMC Jhansi; Upgrade GMC Gorakhpur | 1 new 5 upgrades |
| West Bengal | Upgrade KMC Kolkata | New AIIMS-like |
1 new 1 upgrade |
8 comments June 2nd, 2011
Following is an excerpt from a report in pharmabiz.com.
The civil construction works for the six new AIIMS-like institutions at Bhubaneswar, Patna, Jodhpur, Rishikesh, Raipur and Bhopal started in June last year and were progressing on fast track. The construction of medical colleges is expected to be completed by the end of 2011 and Hospitals by October 2012, sources said.
Ministry of Finance has accorded approval in February, 2011 for creation of 1145 posts (faculty and staff) for each institution to be filled up in the first phase of recruitment process. To manage the running of the new institutions, the Health Ministry has now appointed mentor institutes.
As per this, All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi will be the mentor institute for the two new institutions at Patna and Bhubaneswar. Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER), Chandigarh will take care of the two institutions at Rishikesh and Jodhpur. Jawaharlal Institute of Post-graduate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER), Puducherry will run the affairs of the two new institutions at Bhopal and Raipur, sources said.
2 comments June 2nd, 2011
The MHRD in its page http://www.education.nic.in/tech/tech-newIIITs.asp has put several documents regarding this. The list of documents present there are:
It will be a competitive process in terms of which ones are made when. Several states are gearing up for this. Recently there has been news about this from states such as:
Earlier there was news from West Bengal (Feb 17, 2011) and Odisha (Feb 22, 2011). But this is before the 18th March 2011 meeting and the recent publication of the "Draft criteria for selection of proposals received from the State Government/Union Territories for setting up of new IIITs". Odisha government needs to immediately respond with a good proposal that addresses all aspects of the draft criteria. Odisha’s work is cut-out as proposing Berhampur as a location would need a very strong and well-articulated proposal. The readers from Berhampur, and those who want this to be in Berhampur, need to help the government in this.
3 comments May 29th, 2011
We read this news at http://www.rourkelacity.com/top-news/proffesor-sunil-sarangi-nit-director-hele/. This is really great news. During his previous tenures Prof. Sarangi has quietly done wonders for NIT Rourkela. Following are some earlier links.
One of the things that he should consider pursuing is a medical school as part of NIT Rourkela, perhaps in collaboration with SAIL and/or the state government. In general, Prof. Sarangi should aim for expanding NIT Rourkela with additional programs, while also improving the existing ones.
2 comments May 27th, 2011
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