Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Kharagpur IIT planning campus at Kolkata

Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur plans to open its second campus for undergraduate and postgraduate courses at Rajarhat, Koltata from the 2008 academic session. It will admit 600 students to begin with but the number swell to 2,500 in the subsequent four years.”

According to the institute director S K Dube 10 acres of land has been acquired and construction will start just after Durga Puja.

The Kolkata campus will offer most of the disciplines available at the Kharagpur campus but their number will be decided later. The city campus will run advanced research and development programmes and accommodate trainees for various short-term modules. The Ministry of Human Resource Development has released Rs 25 crore for building the IIT’s Rajarhat campus, Dr Dube said.

Announcing the date of the 52nd convocation of IIT Kharagpur, the chairman, Board of Governors of IIT Kharagpur, Mr Sanjeev Goenka, said that a host of research projects had been lined up for execution over the next two years. The institute earned Rs 52 crore from research projects last year. Defining the revenue targeted for this financial year, Mr Goenka said: “We can calculate the worth of research projects but it is not easy to estimate the revenue that they can generate. This year, though, we will earn more than Rs 52 crore. The target for this year is Rs 100 crore.”

The director of IIT, Kharagpur, Prof SK Dube, said the institute accepted 171 research projects worth Rs 41.70 crore last year.
The institute was already busy with projects worth more than Rs 300 crore, he said. “The institute has earned 25 patents, out of which, two are US patents. This year, IIT, Kharagpur has filed 24 fresh applications,” Prof Dube said.

The IIT plans to raise the student intake at its Kharagpur campus from the current 7,000 to 10,000 over the next few years. It is also deploying an extensive policy for retaining its faculty members. The institute had absorbed around 51 new members of the faculty this year, Prof Dube said.

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