BHUBANESWAR: Additional Secretary of Ministry of Human Resources Development (MHRD) R Subrahmanyam on Saturday urged the IITs to be globally competitive and locally relevant.
Speaking at the 10th Institute Day of IIT Bhubaneswar (IIT-BBS) at Argul here, Subrahmanyam emphasised the emergent need to connect knowledge economy with innovation and urged the students to take up the challenge.
He also elaborated on various initiatives taken up by MHRD, one of which is in the area of Student Driven Technology Solution. "Institutes should come forward to take advantage of technology and excel with such initiatives," he advised. Director of IIT-BBS Prof RV Raja Kumar said several initiatives have been taken to hire professors of foreign origin who are adding to the international outlook of the Institute.
Highlighting the fast-paced growth of the institute in recent years and its dream to march ahead along with senior IITs, he said a new one-of-its-kind specialised course on Cyber Security and Forensics will be offered besides some other courses from next academic session.
Prof Raja Kumar thanked MHRD for its support towards the Phase-II construction worth more than `1000 crore. He assured that the Phase-II infrastructure will be ready by March 2019 as targeted. He reiterated the initiatives made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for making India digitised.
Director of Institute of Physics (IoP) and Acting Director of NISER Prof Sudhakar Panda called upon the students to orient themselves in critical thinking and ensure smooth handshake between science and technology.
He emphasized the need to have meaningful student-teacher interaction to improve the education system and shared about the collaborative research and other activity that is happening among IIT, IoP and NISER.Among others, Dean (Faculty) of IIT-BBS Prof Sujit Roy also spoke. A plantation programme was undertaken on this occasion. Nearly 500 students along with several alumni of IIT faculty, staff and guests participated in the celebration.Nine years ago, on this day the first batch of BTech students of IIT-BBS had started their academic activities on the campus of IIT Kharagpur.