HRD ministry grants Rs 456 crore to IIT Kgp

Kolkata: Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) has granted Rs 456 crore to IIT Kharagpur and three other IITs for developmental projects. According to a recent tweet of the HRD ministry, the highest allocation among the four IITs has been Rs 151.19 crore which has gone to IIT Kharagpur.

IIT Delhi, IIT Madras and IIT Bombay have been granted Rs 105 crore, Rs 103.41 crore and Rs 96.5 crore respectively. The funding was approved based on proposals submitted by the older IITs for augmentation of infrastructure and facilities for holistic excellence.

According to a senior official of IIT Kharagpur, the funding has been earmarked for lab infrastructure, equipment etc.

"We have been focusing towards attracting young talented academicians and postdoctoral fellows from across the world. For this, we need, on one hand, world-class laboratories, high-end equipment to conduct cutting-edge research and on the other, quality living experience such as accommodation facilities and the like. Our proposal significantly highlighted this aspect and we aim to use this amount towards building these facilities," Professor Partha Pratim Chakrabarti, Director, IIT Kharagpur said. It may be mentioned that the institute has already come up with the blueprints to build lab infrastructure of top global standard and acquire equipment for technological convergence domains like manufacturing, transportation, VLSI design, cloud computing, smart infrastructure and affordable healthcare among others.

"We will soon undertake a housing project for facilitating international faculty and postdoctoral fellows. We understand the differential need of these people and are committed to offering them the same world-class experience for their limited durational association with us," added Chakrabarti. The institute has already earmarked Rs 10 crore for sporting activities, infrastructure and undertaken crowd sourced campaigns as well for promoting students' welfare activities.

"We are happy and thank MHRD for having agreed to support almost the total requirement of the proposal submitted. We look forward to an incremental change in the size of faculty and postdoctoral fellows while fostering students' innovations and overall development," he said.