(Editor’s comment: Please read more about the noble RMTS effort and consider contributing to it.)
Dear Friends: Please read the mail below from Dr. Swadheen Pattanayak and rejoice. It has been long 4 years but it seems only the other day when the list of 30 students selected from 1st RMTS(2003) was forwarded by Swadheen, to me in December 2003. Himalaya was second of thirty in the list of merit.
Continue Reading March 24th, 2007
Author : Chitta Baral
Update: The MOU has been signed. [Kalinga Times]
Pragativadi reports that ICFAI plans to sign an MOU with Orissa government to establish an ICFAI university in Bhubaneswar. At present they have universities in Uttaranchal, Tripura, Sikkim, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Jharkhand. For example, ICFAI University in Dehradun has a business school, a science and technology school, a law school, a college of education, etc.
They plan to buy 150 acres of land from private parties near Jatni – the area near the Khurda Road station. The report also says that Orissa government is in the process of making legislation that will allow such private universities like ICFAI university, Vedanta University and Ravishankar University.
March 19th, 2007
Author : Chitta Baral
There is some possibility that IIIT Bhubaneswar classes may start in a building in the Infocity campus. That location has many advantages over the CITE location in Rasulgarh. Effort is on to obtain some chair professorship funded by various companies that have operations in Bhubaneswar and Orissa. The search for a director continues. The plan to start classes in the coming academic year is still on.
March 19th, 2007
Author : Chitta Baral
New Indian Express reports that the Utkal University of Culture has been granted 48 acres of land in the outskirts of Bhubaneswar. It does not exactly say where.
Few days back the Orissa government agreed to give 150 acres of land to Ravenshaw University for its second campus. It also agreed to allocate a significant additional budget of 5-8 crores this year and 80+ crores over the next several years. Various news papers have reported on this and they all have different numbers. Samaja (page1, page2), Sambada and Pioneer are some of the newspapers that report this.
The newspapers list the various new departments that will be there in the new campus. They also mention that while Ravenshaw University currently has 7000 students, it is being made so as to be able to accommodate 25000 students later in this century.
March 17th, 2007
Author : Chitta Baral
Pragativadi on 3/9/2007 reports that HRD minister Mr. Arjun Singh has said that the proposal for an IIT in Orissa is still under consideration and the state government has received a letter to that effect from Mr. Arjun Singh.
However, the headline of the Pragativadi news item “Arjun Singh assures Orissa will have an IIT” does not match with the text of the news item.
Continue Reading March 14th, 2007
Author : Chitta Baral
A press release mentions that the UPA government has opened 72 Ekalavya Vidyalayas in tribal areas across India. 10 of those are in Orissa. Each is constructed using an one time allocation of 250 lakhs towards school building, hostels, teachers’ quarters, library, laboratory etc. An annual grant of 30 lakhs is then given to run the school.
March 14th, 2007
Author : Chitta Baral
Vedanta University has unveiled a new web page since March 1 2007. It has a nice picture of the location of the university. I am told that the architects of the university have come up with a detailed design of the initial buildings. Also, the CAO search is going well and an announcement in this regard may be made in May 2007.
March 13th, 2007
Author : Chitta Baral
It seems progress is being made in this regard. A prominent leader in one of the top IT company of India is in charge of identifying a Dean for the IT/Computer Science program. I am told that T. N. Sheshan again visited Orissa last week regarding starting the university in August 2007. They are planning to have programs in medicine, sciences, and IT/Computer science, among other topics. The grapevine strongly suggests that the land overlooking Kathjodi near the origin of Kathajodi will be given to this university rather than NISER and NISER is being shown alternative land between Khurda and Jatni.
March 13th, 2007
Author : Chitta Baral
NIT Rourkela has decided to start the following departments/schools/centers.
- Department of Biotechnology and Medical Engineering
- B. Tech. (Biotechnology), B. Tech (Biomedical Engg), M. Tech. (Biotechnology), M. Tech (Biomedical Engg), M. Tech.(R ), Ph.D.
- Department of Life Sciences
- M.Sc., M.Tech. ( R) , Ph.D.
- Department of Industrial Design
- B. Des, M. Des., M. Des.(R ), Ph.D.
- School of Management
- MBA/MBM/MMS, PGDMS, PH D, Executive Development Programmes
- Centre of Tribal Development
Admission to all programmes of the department of Biotechnology and Medical Engineering will start in the Academic Year 2007-08 and to the other Departments by Academic Year 2008-09.
This is a great move. I hope they will team up with RSP hospital and/or Rourkela General hospital to start a medical school.
(Thanks to Sandip babu for this news.)
March 5th, 2007
Author : Chitta Baral
An IANS story with the above title has been picked by many papers including Times of India, Hindustan Times and New Indian Express. It talks about the green field IIT alloted to Andhra and the upgradation of Andhra University College of Engineering and Osmania University College of Engineering to IIT like institutions (IIESTs). It also talks about how Orissa was unlucky in neither getting a greefield IIT nor a branch campus of IIT Kharagpur. With the wide coverage this article has received I hope people all over India become aware of the divisive, partisan and discriminatory practices of the HRD ministry. I hope the UPA and its cabinet will realize the follies of their HRD minister and urge him to change course and not blatantly discriminate against Orissa.
Following are some links where the article of the above title appeared:
Continue Reading March 5th, 2007
Author : Chitta Baral
Recently we at Agamee Odisha had two rounds of preparatory meetings (on 26th and 28th Feb) on IIT- movement, of intellectuals, students, professionals, activists and Representatives of mass organisations, net work organisations, NGOs etc. These two meetings were well attended and one of the remarkable features of the meetings was that many important dignitaries attended the meetings and conveyed their solidarity to the movement for IIT in Orissa. In these two meetings the agenda of the first phase of movement has been finalised
which are as below-
Continue Reading March 1st, 2007
Author : Chitta Baral
Today’s New Indian Express reports that director serach for IIIT Bhubaneswar is going on in full swing. The search committee consists of Dr. Sadagopan from IIIT Bangalore, Mr. Subroto Bagchi of Mindtree, Dr. Ramani from HP labs and Mr. Vishal Dev, Director OCAC. The report also says that the project cost will be Rs 45 crores out of which state government has budgeted 10 crores and the remaining is to be raised from private companies.
March 1st, 2007
Author : Chitta Baral
Dear Honorable Union HRD Minister, Government of India, Mr Singh,
With reference to the news report published in Hindustan Times on 26th Feb 2007,
Reference:
http://digpatra.googlepages.com/20070227_HT_IIT.pdf
…
The argument made by HRD ministry saying “presence of 12 centrally funded educational institutes and announced NISER forbid Orissa to get a new IIT†is also equally baseless. If it would have been the case than Andhra Pradesh has 31 such centrally funded institutions including HRD ministry sponsored central university Hyderabad and beside many DRDO
laboratories, still the HRD ministry has proposed new IIT and is also considering for two new IIEST in the state. Additionally other central institutes like IIPH and NIPER are being established in Andhra Pradesh.
Reference:
http://digpatra.googlepages.com/20070227_state_wise_national_lab_ins.pdf
Continue Reading February 28th, 2007
Author : Chitta Baral
The following is from the 2007-08 budget speech:
Means-Cum-Merit Scholarships
20. While the SSA has improved the enrolment ratio in schools to 96 per cent, the drop out ratio continues to be high. The critical year appears to be transition from class VIII to class IX. In order to arrest the drop out ratio and encourage students to continue their education beyond class VIII, I propose to introduce a National Means-cum-Merit Scholarship Scheme. Selection will be made through a national test from among students who have passed class VIII. Each student will be given Rs.6,000 per year for study in classes IX, X, XI and XII. I propose that 100,000 scholarships may be awarded every year. In order to fund this programme, I intend to create a corpus fund of Rs.750 crore this year, and add a like amount to the fund every year over the next three years. Accordingly, a sum of Rs.750 crore will be placed with the State Bank of India, and the yield from the fund will be used for awarding the scholarships.
I like the above provision, especially the number of scholarships and the “means” aspect of it. What exactly the “means” cut-off would be remains to be seen. If this scholarship allows poor motivated students to chose the school of their choice then it will be similar to the voucher system used in Michigan. One worry is that the poor students will use the scholarship money for their family expenses and not for their educational expenses. I would also suggest that the number of scholarships be increased by at least 10% every year and the corresponding amout added to the corpus every year. Besides, private donations to the corpus should be encouraged and as the corpus grows the number of scholarships should grow.
February 28th, 2007
Author : Chitta Baral
In the 2007-08 budget there is no line item budget for NISER. Thats probably because NISER is yet to be approved by the cabinet. However, there is a significant increase in the budget of Institute of Physics and in page 5 item 9.04 it is mentioned that “the responsibility of setting up NISER at Bhubaneswar is entrusted to IOP.”
IOP’s budget (item 9.04, page 1) in 2006-07 was 4.96+9 = 13.6 crores. Its budget in 2007-08 is 32.75 + 7 = 39.5 crores. It can be safely assumed that a major chunk of the additional 25.9 crores is towards the NISER expenses. (Note that there are huge increases in the budget of couple of other institutes too. This includes Harish Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad and Institute of Plasma research, Gandhinagar.)
In the 2006-07 budget for IISERs in Pune and Kolkata (item 70) there was a total of 50 crores which was revised to 20 crores. This line item does not have numbers for 2007-08. There is another line item (item 76) on IISER with 125 crores for the 5 IISERs: the established ones in Pune and Kolkata and the 3 proposed IISERs in Bhopal, Trivendrum and Mohali, Punjab.
Thus the budget meant for NISER compares favourably with the IISER budgets.
February 28th, 2007
Author : Chitta Baral
Ravenshaw University now has UGC approval. It was only in November 2006 that it got approval from the Orissa assembly. Today’s Pioneer reports that it received UGC approval on Febriary 6th. It is now listed in the UGC website of universities in Orissa. Now it awaits the more important status of “Funded by UGC”.
UCE Burla, about which we discussed earlier in December, must be put on a similar path. It must ape BESU (Bengal Engineering and Science University) and CUSAT (Cochin University of Science and Technology) both of which are state universities and have the “Funded by UGC” status. See the UGC West Bengal and Kerala pages here and here respectively. In their attempt to improve UCE Burla, efforts are being made for it to get deemed university status. I think they should just go for a state university status and then go all out to get the “Funded by UGC” status. They should send a delegation to BESU and CUSAT to learn some of the secrets of their success.
February 26th, 2007
Author : Chitta Baral
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