Odisha HRD

IIIT Bhubaneswar hires three more regular faculty and continues looking

As per its web page, IIIT Bhubaneswar has recently hired three new regular faculty. They are:

• Dr. Somnath Tripathy, Ph.D. (IIT, Guwahati)
• Dr. Rakesh Balwantray, Ph. D. (Utkal)
• Prof. Anjali Mohapatra, Continuing Ph. D at Utkal.

With that the regular faculty strength of IIIT Bhubaneswar goes up to 5 with 3 of them having Ph.Ds and the other two pursuing Ph.Ds.

2 comments December 26th, 2007

AICTE approval for increasing the number of students in Rural Management Course in KIIT

Business Standard has a nice article on Kalinga School of Rural Management. Following are some excerpts.

Unlike IRMA, which offers a two-year Post Graduate diploma in Rural Management, KSRM will be able to award an MBA in Rural Management to the first batch of 72 students passing out in 2009 owing to its deemed university status.

The institute has also received the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) approval for increasing the number of students from 74 to 100-120 for the second batch of students in 2008.

LK Vaswani, who taught at IRMA for 16 years and is now the director of KSRM, says the new institute retains the IRMA model of building and sustaining a partnership between rural people and committed professional managers.

But according to Vaswani, a key element that separates IRMA from KRSM, is the lack of inhibition towards its students choosing to work with the private sector.

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“KSRM has decided to avoid taking a sectoral association. We do not believe in having any inhibitions towards the corporate sector considering more and more of them are entering the development sector. In fact, we are associated with the private sector where our students can have hands-on experience in agri-business, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), NGO management, finance and the like,” says Vaswani.

He added that in terms of on-the-field education or experiential learning, the institute hopes to surpass all other rural management schools.

For starters, the institute will hold live field training modules for a duration of 12 weeks which will be conducted thrice a year. The first batch of 72 students from 16 states will be asked to go back to their own states and adopt a village where they will work at the grassroot level. Students will also work with KIIT’s tribal school which has 3,000 children studying in its campus.

While IRMA, the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and other top B-schools face a shortage of faculty, KSRM officials say it does not worry them.

Along with seven core rural management faculty members, three of whom are from IRMA, Vaswani says faculty from the KIIT university’s other institutes like school of law, school of management, school of technology, school of social sciences etc. contribute to almost 50 per cent of the teaching load, making it a very healthy student-faculty ratio. Around 15 rural management faculty will be inducted in 2008.

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The institute has proposed an academic collaboration with the Department of Science and Technology (DST) to ensure the participation of its students in the government’s ‘Science for Society’ programme in partnership with over 40 NGOs.

December 26th, 2007

IIIT construction to be completed in two years

Following is an excerpt from a report in The Statesman.

IIIT, Bhubaneswar, a state initiative project, similar to ones which have been established in other states since long is expected to meet the growing need for appropriate human resource, one of the crucial factors of IT and ITeS sector. The institute aims to be a world-class institute with an objective to impart higher education and undertake advanced research in the field of Information and Communication Technology.

A completely autonomous institute with full academic autonomy and sustained support from industry, IIIT (Bhubaneswar) shall offer M Tech and Doctoral programme in Computer Science.

The state government has already allotted 23.24 acre at Gothapatna, on the outskirts of the capital city. It has also committed a financial grant of Rs 10 crore towards start up capital expenses and a recurring annual grant of Rs 2 crore for the first three years. It may here be mentioned that the departmentally-related Standing Committee-IV of state assembly has also recommended a provision of further Rs 40 crore for the institute to create full-fledged infrastructure including hostel, residential facilities.

Infosys Technologies Limited has also paid Rs 1 crore for instituting a chair professor. State IT minister Surya Narayan Patro today presided over a review meeting of the progress of the institute. He said construction for the institute will commence soon and will be completed in two years time. It will cost around Rs 48 crore, he said. Mr Patro informed that till such time the institute will function at the Orissa Computer Application Center ( OCAC) building.

The selection process of M Tech programme shall be based on an entrance test, followed by interview. Students of BE/B Tech (any stream), MCA and MSc
(Computer Science/ Electronics /Mathematics/ Physics) are eligible to pursue the course. The students will pay approximately Rs 1 lakh annually besides accommodation and other expenses. Few scholarships to eligible students will be given in the second year of the course.

December 26th, 2007