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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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