Thursday, March 06, 2008

Will the new IITs be 'real' universities?


Akshaya Mukul of ToI reports on an interesting (and, to me, welcome) development:

The three new IITs in Bihar, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh will teach not only engineering, but also design and creative arts, management, health sciences, humanities and social sciences.

He also has a few other details about the new IITs:

Initially, each institute will have an intake capacity of 200 students, but when fully developed, each IIT will have a total student strength of about 3,000 students with approximately 2,000 of them in B Tech, 500 in M Tech, 400 in Ph.D and 100 as post-doctoral fellows.

The new IITs will be mentored by one of the existing IITs to enable them to attain high standards. Each institute will have a faculty strength of 262 at the end of the seventh year of operation and adhere to the teacher-student ratio of 1:9, as in the case of other IITs.

4 Comments:

  1. Anonymous said...

    I am not sure that the new IITs are "different" from the existing IITs in this regard.
    Most existing IITs already have departments of design, management, humanities and social sciences and some aspect of health sciences (in the form of biomedical engineering which attracts medical professionals both as faculty and students), though not creative arts.

    Sridhar

  2. Anonymous said...

    ...well only GOD(and may be the HRD minister) knows how the IITs will be able to acute faculty crunch they are going to face.......and also Rajasthan lost out this year due to some petty politics..check this out..
    http://hullaballoo24x7.blogspot.com/2008/03/power-tussle-delays-iit-inrajasthan.html

  3. Anonymous said...

    New IITs and IIMs with added courses are welcome. Thanks to Govt. of India. But, getting high quality students is really questionable as existing IITs, even IISc, are finding difficulty. In fact , it was mentioned in THE HINDU's Sunday magazine. So, there is no point establishing new IITs or IIMs unless strengthening high school and pre-university eduction.

  4. Rachit Chandra said...

    In that sense, BITS Pilani has always been a university. However, in almost all technical universities, the focus (from the admins) mostly lies towards tech stuff.

    Speaking from my own experiences, I find it easy to talk about ideologies, politics, economics, arts, philosophy or for that matter anything with people in Pilani. The typical geek is actually looked down upon here. I believe the same would be true at IITs.