Faculty Positions at NISER Invitation to be part of a new initiative in science education
The National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER) has been setup at Bhubaneswar by the Department of Atomic Energy of the Government of India to be a unique institution of its kind pursuing undergraduate and post-graduate education in science combined with frontline research. The Government of India has made a very generous financial outlay to NISER for the purpose of setting up state-of-the-art research facilities in all branches of basic science and to promote interdisciplinary areas of research.
NISER is being setup in a sprawling 300 acre campus about 3 km from Khurda Road Railway Station on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar overlooking Barunei Hills. It will be a fully residential campus with modern living amenities including children’s school and health centre. Presently NISER operates from the campus of Institute of Physics, a premier research institution funded by the Department of Atomic Energy. The Institute of Physics has vibrant research programmes in theoretical and experimental nuclear physics, condensed matter physics and high energy physics. The infrastructure includes well established library, computer centre, 3MV Pelletron accelerator, a high resolution TEM and several other state-of-the-art instruments for experimental condensed matter research (for details see www.iopb.res.in).
NISER’s own academic block of about 5000 m2 area is under construction in the Institute of Physics campus which will also provide research laboratories for the faculty. Until NISER operates from the Institute of Physics campus, it may provide limited residential accommodation within the town. It is expected to move to the main campus by the academic session of 2011-12.
NISER invites applications from extremely motivated Indian scientists with a high-profile research agenda and a flair for teaching (especially at the undergraduate level) for the following faculty positions bearing scale of pay given against each:
Assistant Professor
12,000-375-16,500
Reader (F)
14,300-400-18,300
Associate Professor
16,400-450-20,000
Professor
18,400-500-22,400
Qualifications: Ph.D. in any area of Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics
Experience: One/two years postdoctoral research and/or teaching experience is desirable for Assistant Professor Grade. For higher grades it should be appropriate to the positions applied for.
The age of superannuation is 65 years. The scale of pay is under revision. In addition to the basic salary, NISER faculty is entitled to allowances as admissible to Central Government Employees stationed at Bhubaneswar and to the DAE’s update allowance, which is currently Rs. 10,000 to Rs. 30,000 per year depending on the scale of pay. They will also receive other fringe benefits (like Relocation Grant, Reimbursement of telephone charges, financial support to attend national/international Conferences/Seminars/Workshops, etc.) which will be comparable to the best in the country.
NISER has sufficient funds to provide seed money to the new faculty to start their research programme. In addition the Department of Atomic Energy provides generous grants from its Prospective Research Fund to bright young scientists.
Interested candidates may apply enclosing:
Curriculum Vitae
List of Publications (with reprints of important papers as pdf files)
Names and addresses (with e-mail and fax number) of at least three referees
A statement of purpose and research programme
The qualification and experience prescribed are the minimum and mere possession of the same does not entitle a candidate to be considered for any position. However, the experience criteria may be relaxed for exceptionally meritorious candidates.
Applications should be sent by e-mail to careers@niser.iopb.res.in marking "Faculty in (branch)" in the subject field (branch being one of the disciplines mentioned above). This is an open advertisement and there is no time limit for sending the application, but the applications received will be taken up for consideration at regular intervals. Candidates are advised to request the Referees to send their letters of recommendations (preferably signed versions as pdf file) directly to NISER at the above e-mail address. Those having regular job in any organization should also send a "No Objection Certificate" from the current employer in electronic form.
All correspondence should be addressed to the above e-mail address only (or any other e-mail address that is notified on the NISER website in future). No postal correspondence is required at any stage. Enquiry regarding the outcome of the application is generally discouraged.
The State Government has identified five places for setting up the proposed IIT. The places are Banki, Jatni, Khurda, Naraj and Nandankanan. While the Centre has decided to set up the IIT in an area of 500 acre of land, the State Government has decided to give 1,000 acre of land for the purpose.
The work for land identification has begun. However, the Centre has asked the State Government to adhere to some rules and regulations while selecting the sites for the purposed IIT. As per the condition, the site must be close to the railway station and airport. The institution should be well connected so that the students would not face any trouble while commuting to attend classes.
However, for the time being the proposed IIT earmarked for the State will operate under the Kharagpur IIT. 120 seats would be reserved for the students.
The state government is wise to look for 1000 acres instead of the 500 acres that the center stipulates. This will allow IIT Bhubaneswar to have sufficient room for future growth.
Many JEE qualified students may be wondering about the new IITs. In a series of articles we will talk about the IIT in Bhubaneswar and the advantages of the Bhubaneswar area.
Bhubaneswar has excellent connectivity by train, road and air. It has multiple daily direct trains to/from Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, a daily train to/from Mumbai, and trains to/from all corners of India (Guwahati, Kerala, Goa, Gujarat, Jaipur, Punjab, Haradwar, Kanpur, Lucknow, Benras, Patna, Raipur, Bhopal, etc.) It has direct train connections to all the old IITs (Bombay, Delhi, Madras, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Roorkee, and Guwahati).
Following is a map of Bhubaneswar’s railway connectivity.
The students admitted to IIT Bhubaneswar will be taking their first year classes at IIT Kharagpur, the oldest IIT. Most likely they will stay in the MMM Hall at IIT Kharagpur. They will be staying with the IIT Kharagpur students.
In contrast, the IIT Gujarat students are reported to start their classes at the Vishwakarma Government Engineering College campus at Chandkheda in Gandhinagar district where IIT Bombay has the extension center. They will be more prone to bring with them the culture, tradition and history of that govt. college. IIT Hyderabad students will have to start from scratch, as it is reported that their classes will be held in Isnapur near SangaReddy in Medak district, near Hyderabad.About the arrangements in IIT Rajasthan, Times of India has this to say: "Apartments of IIT-K’s guest house would be converted into hostels for students of IIT-Rajasthan. Classes and labs would be held in shifts. If IIT-K classes are held in the morning shift, IIT-R students would have to attend classes in the evening and similar arrangement would be made for labs".
"The state government thanks Minister of State for Power and Commerce Jairam Ramesh for announcing at a function held Friday at Sipat in Bilaspur district to set up an IIIT in Chhattisgarh," a government press statement said.
"The state government will soon provide the location for the new IIIT as the announcement was made by the central minister as per the initiatives taken by Chief Minister Raman Singh April 20 when they had a meeting in Raipur," the statement read.
Officials said that the state government may offer a massive plot for the IIIT in Naya Raipur where the government is presently developing a new satellite town that will replace Raipur as the new state capital of Chhattisgarh, probably by 2011.
Naya Raipur, about 20 km east of here and located between national highways 6 and 43, will be spread out over 8,000 hectares.
Regardless of the NASSCOM recommendation the Orissa government and Minister of state Mr. Chandrasekhar Sahu must push for a IIIT in Berhampur, the third largest metropolitan area of Orissa. (The other two, Bhubaneswar and Rourkela, have other national institutions.)
The proposed IITs and their mentor institutions are IIT Gujarat/Gandhinagar (IIT Bombay), Punjab (IIT Delhi), Patna (IIT Guwahati), Rajasthan (IIT Kanpur), Bhubaneswar (IIT Kharagpur), and Hyderabad (IIT Madras). While all will offer electrical and mechanical engineering, IIT Gandhinagar will offer chemical engineering, IIT Bhubaneswar will offer civil engineering, and the rest will offer computer science and engineering.
“The curriculum, syllabus, fee structure and other rules for the new IITs will broadly remain the same as in the respective mentor IITs,” the IIT-B official said.
The first-year classes for IIT Punjab, Rajasthan, and Bhubaneswar will be conducted at the campuses of the mentor IITs. The students will be shifted to the respective locations in the second year. Classes for the other new IITs will be conducted in the cities where the IITs are being located.
National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER)
(Academic Session 2008-09)
The list of candidates short-listed on the basis of performance in NEST-2008 held on April 20, 2008 and called for interview is available HERE.
The interview will be held during 23 – 27 June, 2008 at :
Institute of Physics
Sachivalaya Marg, Bhubaneswar – 751005
(0674) – 2301825 / 2301823 / 2301058
Candidates should report at the above address at 8.00 a.m. on the day of the interview. The interview will be held throughout the day. The interview of a candidate may be held anytime between 8.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m. on that day. Outstation candidates should make their own arrangements for travel and accommodation. SC/ST and PD (Persons with Disability) candidates will be entitled to travel allowance (second class train fare/bus fare from place of residence to Bhubaneswar and back, by the shortest route) as per the institute norms.
Candidates are required to bring with them at the time of interview the following documents in original :
Class X and Class XII mark sheets.
Proof of date of birth.
Caste/tribe certificate issued by a competent authority (in case of SC/ST students).
OBC certificate and undertaking (in case of OBC candidates in the non-creamy layer)
In case of non-availability of class XII mark sheet in original, the candidate will have to give an undertaking to that effect. In case of candidates in the PD category, a Medical Officer appointed by the Institute for the purpose will certify whether a candidate qualifies to be under that category. Format of OBC certificate and undertaking can be seen HERE.
In case of any problem, please send e-mail to admission@niser.iopb.res.in
The National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) on Thursday suggested the 20 cities for setting up new Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT).
Delhi, Chennai, Thiruvananthapuram, Bangalore and Jammu are among the cities suggested.
… In its model detailed project report (DPR) presented to the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Nasscom, the trade body representing the Indian information technology and business process outsourcing (IT-BPO) industry, has also included the names of Chandigarh, Dehradun, Lucknow, Patna, Shillong, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Indore, Nagpur, Bhubaneshwar, Pune, Visakhapatanam, Mysore, Mangalore and Coimbatore for establishing new IIITs. PPP model
In its model DPR that will serve as a template for the preparation of the DPR for each individual IIIT, Nasscom has proposed that the new IIITs be set up as a fully autonomous institutions, through a public-private partnership (PPP) model. The partners in setting up the IIITs should be the Ministry, the respective State governments and industry members.
National importance
According to Nasscom president Som Mittal, each IIIT has been envisioned to become a world-class academic institute and evolve into technology and functional ‘Centres of Excellence’ through a strong focus on research in frontier technology areas.
To achieve this, it is imperative to attract best-in-class faculty, and students; develop sustainable linkages with industry; and provide an environment conducive for research excellence.
To justify the large investments being made in the IIITs, it is important that they provide a sufficient scale at undergraduate, post-graduate and doctoral research levels, he added. …
Autonomy
“The model for the new IIITs proposed in the DPR focuses on both academic and research excellence through innovative governance and operational approaches and a strong and sustained participation from the IT industry.
“However, achieving this will not be easy and it is important that each institute is supported, especially in the initial years, and is also allowed complete autonomy to define its roadmap and implement it,” Mr. Mittal added.
While required investment into the IIITs could vary depending on the city, close to Rs 100 crore has been estimated for each IIIT. …
The locations of IIITs have been arrived at on the basis of how well connected they are in terms of transport and facilities and their prominence to industrial hubs. Considering the dire faculty crunch in the country, Nasscom has made it clear that faculty members must be be given salaries prevalent in the market.
It has been suggested that each IIIT must have the autonomy to decide its own salary structure to compete with private educational institutes. Collaborating private organisations would be requested to send their experienced employees as visiting faculty members. A higher number of visiting faculty and faculty-exchange programmes with universities in India and abroad have been suggested.
…
The report says all programmes in an IIIT should be given equal importance, having noted that generally it is the undergraduate programme in institutes that receives most of the attention. It has been suggested that other post-graduate programmes, especially the PhD programmes, should not be compromised with.
The development of the PhD programme, according to one of the suggestions, is vital to the growth of IIITs as these doctoral students could be groomed for teaching positions in IIITs, creating a strong pool of candidates for top academic positions.
It has been recommended that the undergraduate programme of IIITs could be scaled up to 600 students, the post-graduate programme could take about 400 students and the PhD programme could have an intake of 100 students.
A faculty-student ratio of 1:14 has been suggested. The report has suggested an integrated campus model and a hub-and-spoke campus model, depending on the IIIT.
The Orissa government has to figure out a way to have this IIIT in Berhampur and if not then convince the central govt. to establish one of the proposed 10 NITs in Berhampur.
The site http://www.tifr.res.in/~nest/Results.html lists the roll numbers of students with a percentile of more than 50. There are about 4000 such students. (So total number of students that appeared this exam is 8000.) The site http://www.tifr.res.in/~nest/NISER-int.html list the 330 or so students who have been called for interview. In this list of 330 or so there are 47 from the Orissa centers. Out of these 47, two of them are among the top 8 that have a perecntile more than 99.9. Those two are (i) 1523056 Soumyashanta Nayak with 99.93 percentile and (ii) 1513038 Aditya Acharya with 99.92 percentile.
After the interview NISER will admit 40 students. So 4% of the students who appeared the entrance are called for interview and 0.5% (one out of 200) of the students who appeared the entrance will be selected.
47 of the 330 candidates called for interview are from Orissa centers. I.e., a percentage of about 14%.
DR. ANBUMANI RAMADOSS: … Coming to the AIIMS-like institutions, my predecessor, Shrimati Sushma Swaraj, when she was the Minister, she had launched a scheme called Pradhan Mantri Swasth Suraksha Yojana, under which they wanted to build six new AIIMS-like institutions and upgrade seven existing institutions to a certain level. Then, after that, our Government took over. At that time, since elections were there, they could not proceed further and the UPA Government took over. It is not like that with the change in Government, the policy would change. Shri Tripathy was mentioning about the political interference and all that, which I would definitely counter that. It is a continuity. Government comes and Government goes but it is a continuity. Definitely, we are following the programme. I would like to commend my predecessor, Shrimati Sushma Swaraj for bringing out that very innovative concept. I have already thanked and commended her for this. Definitely, we are going through this. Again, I would like to say that there has been a delay. I acknowledge the delay; I regret for the same. I could explain the delay, etc. In fact, the Standing Committee on Health has gone in depth into this and they were also upset. I am more upset than the Standing Committee. There has been some delay due to non-response to the tenders, etc. Work has started in Rajasthan; work would be starting in one or two months in Bhubaneswar, in Bhopal, in Patna, etc. This is how the work is distributed and it would take little more time for me.
Even though the previous Government had plans of building six new and improving seven institutions, we are now improving nearly 13 institutions – from seven we are improving 13. Kerala was not in the list of the last Government. After the UPA Government came into power, we included Trivandrum Medical College in Kerala for upgradation and allocated Rs.120 crore. Throughout the country, we have just one slab of Rs.120 crore – Rs.20 crore from the local Government and Rs.100 crore from the Central Government. We try to do that. I would like to assure my friend, Shri Tripathy and others that definitely we are trying to work out the modalities. We had split between the housing and the hospital, etc. to quicken the pace of work. Again, I would like to categorically assure the House that we are definitely into the projects, Sir.
SHRI KHARABELA SWAIN (BALASORE): Mr. Minister, are we to take it as an assurance from you that in Bhubaneswar, the work will start within the next two months?
DR. ANBUMANI RAMADOSS: Within the next three months, it will start in Bhubaneswar.
SHRI KHARABELA SWAIN (BALASORE): Okay, three months’ time is all right.
DR. ANBUMANI RAMADOSS: In three months’ time, the work will start in Bhubaneshwar.
SHRI KHARABELA SWAIN (BALASORE): Thank you.
Viswas and others: Please note that besides the six new AIIMS-like institutes the government is taking up the upgradation of 13 exisiting medical colleges to AIIMS standard. Note that some states (UP, J & K and Andhra Pradesh) will have two of their institutes upgraded. Orissa should try to have one of its other medical colleges outside the Bhubaneswar area to be upgraded to that level. The medical colleges in Berhampur and Burla could be possible candidates.
The following list is from http://dst.gov.in/autonomous/autonomous_index.htm. Orissa does not figure in that list. In 2005 Orissa was trying for one. See https://www.orissalinks.com/?p=948. But nothing seems to have happened since then. (Orissa does have the "Institute of Life Sciences" which is funded by the Department of Biotechnology, which is under the Ministry of Science of Technology.)
Directorate of Construction, Services & Estate Management
NOTICE FOR PREQUALIFICATION CUM TENDER (TWO BID) Tender No DCSE/Head (PCD)/NISER-/Fencing /204/2008dt 08 April 2008
Chief Engineer ,DCSEM, DAE, 3rd floor, VikramSarabhaiBhavan, Anushaktinagar, Mumbai-400 094, on behalf of President of India, invites sealed tenders (in TWO BID) from eligible Contractors for “PROVIDING BARBED WIRE FENCING AND MS GATE FOR NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND RESEARCH (NISER) AT PROPOSED LAND AT Teshil: JATNI, District:KHURDA, ORISSA.”. Estimated costRs.55 Lakhs.:E.M.D. Rs.1.10 LakhsSecurity Deposit@ 10% of tendered amount (as per Clause 1 & 1A of General Conditions of Contract.Completion Period3 (Three months).Pre-bid meeting shall be held on 12-05-2008 at 14.30 Hrs. in the Office of the Engineer-in-charge, DCSEM, D.A.E , Institute of Physics, SachivalyaMarg,Bhubaneswar 751 006. Tenders shall be received in the Office of the Engineer-in-charge, DCSEM, D.A.E , Institute of Physics, SachivalyaMarg,Bhubaneswar751 006 on 20-05-2008 up to 15.00 Hrs and only Technical bid shall be opened on 20-05-2008 at15.30 Hrs. Financial Bids shall be opened at a later date, which will be notified separately. Opening of Financial Bids shall be subject to short listing of the bidders on verification of their credentials and inspection of works carried out by them, through a Technical Committee of experts formed by DCSEM. EMD in a separate sealed cover shall be received at the time of opening of Financial Bids. Tender documents can be had from 15-04-2008to05-05-2008 on any working day between 11-00 Hrs. and 16-00 Hrs. from Office of the Project Engineer (EW), DCSEM, DAE, 1/AF, Bidhannagar, Kolkata-700 064&Office of the Engineer-in-charge, DCSEM, D.A.E , Institute of Physics, SachivalyaMarg,Bhubaneswar 751 006on application with the following credentials : 1.Proof of registration with Government/Semi Government organizations like CPWD, MES, Railways, and State PWD’s in appropriate class or having experience in carrying out similar type of works.2.List of construction plants, machinery and infrastructure facilities to complete the work in time. 3.List of technical staff possessed etc. 4.List of similar works in hand and works carried out by them for the last five years indicating annual turnover, the agency for whom executed, value of work, completion time, stipulated and actual or present position of the work. 5.Performance certificates. 6. Latest Solvency Certificate of minimum Rs.22 Lakhs from any scheduled banks. Parties fulfilling following criteria shall only be considered for issue of tender documents and pre-qualification :i)Average Annual Turnover not less than Rs.66 Lakhs during last three yearsending 31.03.2008 indicated in ITCC or Profit & Loss Statement.ii)Should not have incurred any loss in more than two years during last 5 (five) years ending 31.03.2008.iii) Experience of having successfully completed works as follows during the last five years ending on 31-03-08:1.Three similar completed works costing not less than Rs. 22Lakhs eachOR2.Two similar completed works each not less than Rs. 33 Lakhseach OR3. One similar completed work costing not less than Rs. 44Lakhs.iv) Similar works shall mean experience in construction of fencing / civilworks.In the absence of any documents listed above, the requisition for issue of tender forms will not be considered.Cost of tender documents Rs. 1000/- (non-refundable) payable in Cash to Pay & Accounts Officer, VECC, DAE, Kolkata.Chief Engineer, DCSEM,, Mumbai reserves the right to accept or reject the tender in full or in part without assigning any reason thereof.Tender with any condition including conditional rebate shall be rejected forthwith.
