Odisha HRD

Vedanta University expects to start in 2011

Following are excerpts from a recent (March 19, 2009) report in Business Standard.

The Anil Agarwal-promoted Vedanta University will begin operations by mid-2011 in Puri, Orissa. Agarwal plans to make Vedanta University into a world-class, multi-disciplinary varsity with students from across India and around the world.

The university, being built with an investment of Rs 15,000 crore, will come up in three phases. Phase one will be operational by mid-2011 with an investment of Rs 5,000 crore. The first academic session at the university was to begin in 2009 but the project has been delayed by two years due to a land acquisition tussle with the local residents of Puri.

… To begin with, the university will start operations with around 1,000 students in the arts and science streams. The student intake, however, will grow steadily to reach an ultimate goal of 100,000 students. The university board on the other hand is still working on the modalities involving admission and fee structure.

“We have all the necessary approvals in place from various academic authorities in the country. However, certain details regarding the admission process need to be worked on. We plan to produce professionals far superior to what any other institute can produce in the country,” said C V Krishnan, CEO, Vedanta University.

The university has awarded construction contracts of the academic buildings as well as the hospital at the project site to companies like Larsen & Toubro, Shapoorji Pallonji, Ahluwalia, B E Billimoria and Simplex. Architects Ayers Saint Gross of Baltimore, USA, have prepared the master plan of the University.

The campus will have a super specialty hospital, which will answer a long standing need for providing comprehensive and specialised patient care for the people of Orissa and eastern India. Both the University and the hospital are ‘not-for-profit’ institutions.

World-renowned hospital architects are developing the design for the hospital, Perkins and Will from USA. The university will also establish research parks to promote science and technology-based entrepreneurship and support an innovation-driven incubator. E-learning programmes will also be launched in future.

“We will be recruiting young professors with inclination towards research. We have already hired a US-based recruitment agency to appoint faculty for the university,” added Krishnan.

7 comments April 5th, 2009

The 12 new central universities will start with only research programs

Following is excerpted from a report in Telegraph.

Twelve new central universities that India is launching will start by offering only research programmes — MPhil and PhD — unlike existing varsities that are controlled by the Centre.

The new universities will focus exclusively on research, at least initially, though they can later expand and offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses not involving research as well, top government officials have said.

… But the 12 new universities will initially offer only research programmes, human resource development (HRD) ministry sources said.

“We will leave it open to each university to decide what research programmes they want to start with. At least one university wants to start with only MPhil courses. That is fine,” a source said.

The 12 new universities are to come up in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Orissa, Rajasthan, Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat, Jharkhand and Bihar.

At least three of the 12 are expected to start offering courses from the 2009 academic session itself, though more may begin.

The strategy to focus only on research initially at the new universities is based on three major considerations, sources said.

One, it will allow the universities to initially “find their feet” without the pressure of a large number of students, officials argue.

April 5th, 2009