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LATEST
NEWS |
12th
February 2010 / Times of India / Mumbai Edition
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 IIT-Bs satellite campus plan in Guj shelved
Mumbai: Gandhinagar may have got a brand new Indian Institute of Technology. But the established IIT-Bombay , which opened its extension campus there in 2007, has closed down. IIT-B had started offering management programmes there. However, these have now been discontinued.
The decision to back out of Gujarat was taken as the state already has an IIT now. Moreover , we never got permission from the central government to start the satellite campus, said Devang Khakhar, director of the Powai tech school. IITBombay , which was on an expansion mode, had initially approached the Goa government in 2006, but talks failed.
By then, IIT-Kharagpur had two extension centres: in Kolkata and Bhubaneswar. In 2007-08 , when the central government did not include Gujarat among the states where new IITs would start operations, Narendra Modi wooed IIT-B with the promise of a large campus and tax waivers. The Gujarat government signed a memorandum of understanding in October 2007 and the extension centre started operating from Government Engineering College, Chandkheda. Now, the new IIT-Gandhinagar is occupying the premises.
But, IIT-B has decided to focus on mentoring IIT-Indore and handling their own large campus, which has grown almost double in student strength since the OBC quota roll-out . On the other hand, IIT-Gandhinagar director Sudhir Jain said his college had already started doing the task that IITBombay had intended to do. The programmes that were planned by IIT-Bombay are dormant now. In fact, we recently ran some programmes on lowcost automation for industry personnel. A recent workshop on nuclear energy for the power sector was a success too, he elaborated.
IIT-B had chalked out several plans for the extension centre . There were talks on developing it into the distance education hub for IIT-B ; moreover, research and consultancy cells were going to be set up there. The MoU had stated that faculty from IIT-B could fly down and interact for all the programmes offered from the extension centre. None of these are likely to take place now.
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