Archive for November 18th, 2007

14 World class universities in India: Guidelines being formulated, States to compete

Following is an excerpt from a report on this in Economic Times.

NEW DELHI: With a thrust on improving the standard of higher education, government is working on a proposal to set up 14 ‘World Class Universities’ across the country at an early date.

A blueprint is being prepared by the Human Resources Development (HRD) Ministry and Planning Commission to set out the criteria for such universities, which will have a business management school, an engineering college, a medical college, a law college in a single campus.

The proposal is being pursued by the Prime Minister’s office which has asked the HRD Ministry and Planning Commission to expedite formulation of guidelines for such universities and give the final picture by the third week of this month.

… The HRD Ministry and Planning Commission have started working on these guidelines acting on the proposal of full Planning Commission meeting on education sector that held on September 13.

"We are working at a very fast pace on the guidelines because we have already been told once by the PMO that we are behind the schedule. So soon we will have the guidelines in place," said Mungekar, former Vice Chancellor of Mumbai University.

… Proposals for setting up the ‘World Class Universities’ will be invited from all the states and those meeting the criteria will benefit. This will, in effect, do away with allegations of discrimination by states.

"The rules are going to be very stringent. The states have to compete to get the world class university," Mungekar said while giving an outline of the regulations.

Besides reasonable rules like a big plot of a land for free in prime location, there would be other demanding criteria that the states will have to meet while competing for having such universities.

In the allotment of such centrally-funded universities, priority will be given to states which do not have central varsities at present.

Orissa must get ready to prepare and send a good proposal on this. After the criteria is announced there may not be much time to do this. So preparing for this beforehand is important.

1 comment November 18th, 2007

A campus for India, shaped like a mandala: New Urban News article on Vedanta University

From the SEPTEMBER 2007 issue of New Urban News

A campus for India, shaped like a mandala

Courtesy of Ayers Saint Gross

Vedanta, the largest new university in the world, will have a plan that draws from Indian spiritual traditions.

On an expanse of flat rural land near the Bay of Bengal, earth-moving is to get under way this fall for an extraordinary institution. Vedanta University — to be built with a billion dollars donated by Indian industrialist Anil Agarwal — will have a shape like no other university on the planet (see plan, above, and on home page).

Dhiru Thadani, lead architect-planner at Ayers Saint Gross (ASG), has been spending about one week per month in India, spearheading the master-planning of the approximately 10,000-acre project. Thadani and his team have produced a remarkable, complex layout, one that suggests an elaborate mandala.

A mandala — a symbol associated with Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions as well — is sometimes defined as a geometric pattern that represents the cosmos. The mandala that Thadani’s team has created in the state of Orissa consists of two large, overlapping circles, each half a mile in diameter. They sit within a larger oval that stretches about 1.4 miles from east to west.

Within the two circles and the 780-acre oval, there may eventually be as many as 280 university buildings, predominantly three to five stories high. Thanks to their disciplined arrangement, tight spacing, and consistent heights, the buildings will form dozens of well-defined outdoor spaces, ranging from small private courtyards to quadrangles and parks.

The patterns made by the buildings’ curved, angled, or straight walls will be intricate. Weaving through them will eventually be 100,000 students, plus tens of thousands of teachers, administrators, and others.

Thadani, who was born in Bombay (Mumbai) and educated at Catholic University in Washington, DC, is based in Washington, but has previously worked on large planning projects in his native country. He and Adam Gross, principals at Baltimore-based ASG, say they set out to make the campus “Indian in spirit.”

The western circle, containing humanities programs, has an oval open space at its center and “is organized by a series of radiating spokes representing the Indian flag and the spokes on Gandhi’s spinning wheel,” a master plan document explains. “The eastern circle — science — is organized orthogonally around a central square, representing practice and research that is grounded in the earth.”

Unlike many universities, where the arts and humanities occupy the well-loved, walkable core of the campus, while the science, engineering, and professional schools sit in less lovely, more disconnected settings, Vedanta is striving for an intertwining of disciplines — with all of them enjoying a pleasing ambience.

FITTING THE LOCAL CLIMATE
For protection from the sun and from the 79 inches of rain that fall annually on this section of India, the planners called for continuous arcades, which can also keep the buildings cooler. They encountered some resistance — arcades in India are sometimes associated with housing occupied by the poor — but the logic of the arcades seems to have won out.

Prior to starting Vedanta’s planning, some of the principal figures — from India and the US — toured several campuses. The three- to five-story height of most of the buildings is consistent with precedents the team examined, including the University of Virginia, Stanford University, and the city of Bologna, Italy.

Among their practical advantages, those heights reduce the need for elevators and mechanical equipment. A key element of circulation inside the buildings will be grand staircases placed within atriums. Big rooms, such as auditoriums, will be mostly at first-floor level, to keep most traffic at the lower level. Academic buildings will be constructed mainly of concrete, with stone cladding. “There’s a lot of granite in this area,” Thadani points out, so it’s affordable. Residential buildings may have stone on the ground floor and stucco above.

The goal is for 40 percent of the buildings to do without air conditioning, relying on stone screens, cross-ventilation, and other tactics to ameliorate the hot climate. “That will not be possible in laboratory buildings,” Thadani acknowledges.

In Indian educational circles, one tendency today is for people to want buildings that look very modern, with an abundance of glass — ostensibly forward-looking structures. But across much of Asia, this mindset is producing many buildings that consume power heavily, ignore human scale, inadequately define public spaces, and seem at odds with traditional places. “From the start, we have been emphatically talking about sustainability,” Thadani notes. Emphasizing sustainability can win people over to an architecture that is generally not so flashy but is more economical, more urbane, and presumably of more lasting value.
Besides planning the campus and the surrounding township, which may ultimately have a population of 400,000, ASG is designing three of Vedanta’s first buildings — a library, a science building, and a humanities building. These structures divide a diamond-shaped open space where the campus’s two circles overlap. The firm is also programming three other buildings.

Thadani and Gross are encouraging the client to retain other architects for other buildings. However, the US-based designers hope to continue in a design review capacity once the master plan is in place. As of mid-August, the plan was nearly complete.


This article is available in the September 2007 issue of New Urban News, along with images and many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue.

November 18th, 2007

Vedanta University project reaches out

Following is an excerpt from a report in Statesman.

Vedanta University project and Anil Agrawal Foundation launched a mobile healthcare unit at Chhaitana Kabirajpur village under Gop block in Puri district yesterday.

It was launched by Mr Trilochan Baral, chief district medical officer (CDMO), Puri.

Mr Prashant Hota, general manager (CSR), Vedanta Orissa projects was present on this occasion.

The ambulance van of this mobile healthcare unit will pay weekly visits to the areas to be affected by the Vedanta University project and the nearby villages under Puri Sadar, Gop and Satyabadi blocks in a phased manner accompanied by doctors, pharmacists, nurses and other health workers.

1 comment November 18th, 2007


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