Odisha HRD

ESI Corporation is eying the private colleges to increase its IPs (insured persons); that may be the reason it instists that its medical college in Odisha be in the Bhubaneswar area

Following is from the page http://esic.nic.in/coverage.htm.

Applicability
Under Section 2(12) The Act is applicable to the factories employing 10 or more persons irrespective of whether power is used in the process of manufacturing or not.

Under Section 1(5) of the Act, the Scheme has been extended to shops, hotels, restaurants, cinemas including preview theatre, road motor transport undertakings and newspaper establishment employing 20 or more persons.

Further, u/s 1(5) of the Act, the Scheme has been extended to Private Medical and Educational Institutions employing 20 or more persons in certain States .

Following is from a report in Times of India.

All educational institutions, including public, private, aided or those run by individuals, trusts and societies, and employing 20 or more persons should pay Employees State Insurance (ESI) premium for their employees, the Madras high court has ruled.

Justice K Chandru, dismissing a batch of writ petitions against the legality of a notification issued by the labour department of the Union territory of Puducherry, said: "Any establishment can be validly notified by the appropriate government to be covered by the provisions of the ESI Act."

The writ petitions were filed after the lieutenant-governor of the Union territory of Puducherry issued a notification mandating that educational institutions including public, private, aided or partially aided employees, run by individuals, trusts and societies, would be covered by the ESI Act if they employed 20 or more persons in their organisations on any day of the preceding 12 months.

Consequently, ESI sent notices to the organisations and directed them to cover their employees under the act. The ESI also followed it up with show-cause notices, and later sent prosecution notices threatening to levy damages under Section 85-B of the ESI Act. While some of the institutions paid up the amount, many of them filed writ petitions noting that the territorial administration lacked the legislative sanction to issue the notification as the Centre also could come out with such notifications.

It seems at this time Odisha government has not required private medical and education institutions be covered by ESI.  But perhaps ESI would like that and therefore it is trying to put up its medical college in Bhubaneswar, where 60-70% of the state’s private colleges (engineering, management, etc.) are.

The following ad came in today’s Dharitri.

July 20th, 2011

Regional parameical center to be in Sijua near AIIMS-like institution: Dharitri

July 12th, 2011

2011 open-close ranks (after the 1st and 3rd rounds) of EE and Mech of IITs, IT-BHU and ISM

The following table is extracted from http://jee.iitd.ac.in/openclose2011.php at two different times. The black version is after the first round and the red version is after the 3rd round.

 Among the new IITs the preference this year seems to be H > N >> {A, U, E} > J > {C,P}.

• The 2010 open-close ranks are here.
• The 2009 open-close ranks are here.
• The 2008 open-close ranks are here.

June 30th, 2011

L & T to execute NISER Bhubaneswar construction; work to start next month and be completed in 36 months

Following are excerpts from Bibhuti Barik’s report in Telegraph.

… The master plan is ready and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) has selected Larsen and Toubro (L&T) to execute the job. They are expected to start the work next month. The project has to be completed within 36 months … We hope that the Phase-I work comprising four major schools and the administrative block will be over by the end of 2013,’’ said the institute’s registrar, AK Naik.

The campus is coming up on 298 acres near Jatni.

While the forest department has already marked 285 trees for felling top facilitate work, steps to ensure enough greenery are being taken by planting 2,500 saplings along its fenced boundary. “We are planning more afforestation programmes in future,” added Naik.

The project envisages an expenditure of Rs 457 crore in the first phase including Rs 160 core on residential township and Rs 130 crore on academic buildings and a sports complex. The Centre has sanctioned Rs 823.19 core for the entire campus project in Bhubaneswar.

After fencing the authorities have deployed a 25-member security team with a supervising officer to keep watch. … the NISER campus site is safe. A transformer has been installed at the site to ensure uninterrupted power supply. Two corrugated tin sheds have also been put up at the site for the engineers to work out of.

The Registrar added that the construction work was getting delayed as the approval of the one of a senior officials of the Ministry of Finance was still awaited. Once it was available the executing agency would go ahead with the work. Earlier there was some delay on account of the time taken by the department of atomic energy (DAE) to grant certain approvals.

“The DAE technical panel inspected, checked and approved each and every aspect of the engineering drawing which took one year,” said a senior professor, who is an advisor and member on the NISER Board.

Currently operating from a transit campus of 5,000 square metres within the Institute of Physics (IoP), Bhubaneswar premises, NISER has lab, teaching and research facilities. While Rs 12.5 crore has been spent on these facilities for the school of chemistry Rs 13.5 crore for the school of physics, Rs 25 crore for the school of biology and Rs 5 crore for the school of mathematics.

… “We have been promised a three-acre plot by the state government for setting up a city campus in future. This will include a 1,500 seated conference hall,” said the registrar.

1 comment June 24th, 2011

IIT Bhubaneswar plans its first construction tender in July and second one in December 2011; but overall campus is not likely to be ready by 2013

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

Excerpts from Mohandas Pai’s article on IITs possibly becoming less relevant

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

NIT Rourkela advertises for Teaching Assistant positions in Computer Science leading to an M.Tech (Res) degree

June 14th, 2011

My thoughts on “Taking IITs to Excellence and Greater Relevance”

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.

• It will result in more IIT (and NIT) graduate pursuing research.
• It will result in more funds for the institutes.
• The students will have a clear expectations. The ones going to the "research-honors" program will know that research is expected of them and they are supposed to study hard.

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

NISER Bhubaneswar campus virtual walkthrough

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

Plus 2 arts students with Math are eligible for B.Tech(IT) in IIIT Delhi

Following is an excerpt from a blog entry of the current director of IIIT Delhi.

After all this background study, and a lot of discussions, IIIT-Delhi finally decided to take the lead and shift to requiring only Maths as a necessary pre-requisite for applying for admission to BTech(IT). Of course, the Institute still will have an aptitude test for selection.

However, this seems to be only useful for students from Delhi. (Please double-check at the IIIT Delhi website.) I.e., Delhi Plus 2 arts students with Maths will be eligible to the BTech(IT) program of IIIT Delhi.

Although there are 15% seats for out-side Delhi students, these students have to take AIEEE.

June 6th, 2011

New AIIMS-like Institutions and upgrdation of medical colleges to AIIMS level; Bihar to have 3, UP to have 6, Odisha complacent and incompetent at 1.

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.

8 comments June 2nd, 2011

AIIMS Delhi to mentor AIIMS-like institute in Bhubaneswar and Patna; 1145 posts (faculty and staff) for each institution to be filled up in the first phase of recruitment

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

Odisha looking for companies to partner for the PPP (50-35-15) based IIIT

1 comment June 1st, 2011

Setting up of 20 new IIITs

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:

• Scheme of the setting up of 20 new IIITs on PPP model.
• Records of discussion of the workshop on setting up of 20 new IIITs on PPP model organized on 18th March 2011 at IIT, Delhi.
• Draft – Memorandum of Association and Rules of IIIT. 
• Draft – Memorandum of Agreement between the President of India; the Governor of the State and Industry Partner namely in connection with setting up 20 new IIITs  on PPP model. 
• Draft format for Proposals  from the Government/UTs for setting up of new IIIT. 
• Draft recommendations for selecting industry partners for setting up IITs in PPP mode.
• Draft criteria for selection of proposals received from the State Government/Union Territories for setting up of new IIITs.
• DPR on setting up new IIITs.

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:

• Maharashtra, proposing it to be in the Pune-Mumbai belt. (May 25, 2011).
• Chhatisgarh. (May 29, 2011).
• Himachal Pradesh. (May 21, 2011)
• Karnataka, in Dharwad (May 19, 2011).
• Bihar (May 2 2011).

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

Prof. Sunil Sarangi gets another term as the director of NIT Rourkela

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.

• https://www.orissalinks.com/archives/3666.
• https://www.orissalinks.com/archives/5767.

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

The 20 new IIITs will come up in phases; Only six in the near future?

The Kakodkar committee report titled “Taking IITs to Excellence and Greater Relevance” available at http://www.education.nic.in/tech/KakodkarCommitteeReport-05132011.pdf  has the following in page 152.

Similarly, there are 4 IIITs today and 6 new ones coming up.

Perhaps this committee had inside information on the new IIITs. If they are going to make only 6 of the proposed 20 now, Odisha (and Berhampur) need to pursue hard to be one of those early locations. So far I have come across news items regarding new IIITs in the following states. It is not clear if the central govt. selectively approached a subset of the proposed 20 (that includes these states) or if they approached all and only some of them went to the media.

• Chhatisgarh prepares to have a IIIT. (May 29, 2011)
• Bihar responds quickly on IIIT in Bihar. (May 2, 2011).
• Karnataka is pushing its IIIT to be in Dharwad.
• Odisha responds to the central govt. regarding a IIIT in Odisha.
• West Bengal.
• Himachal Pradesh.

May 20th, 2011