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Buddha: IIT-Kharagpur Kolkata campus a fillip to rural economy

By Mrs Gupta, Section Education
Posted on Wed Nov 08, 2006 at 05:16:57 AM EST

Chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee today said that there is still a lot to be done to boost the state’s rural economy. And to improve the quality of life and economy, extensive research and development is the remedy.

Speaking at a foundation laying ceremony of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur’s Kolkata campus - the chief minister said that there are many districts in West Bengal where people are suffering. Self-reliance and indigenous technologies are the call of the hour to eradicate the economic maladies. IIT-KGP can definitely contribute in this regard,” Bhattacharjee said.

The chief minister named districts like Purulia and Midnapore where the government is facing severe water management crisis. The villages are prone to droughts, floods and arsenic contamination. “We need technology to curb the problem and IIT-KGP can help in providing solution to all the issues. But research and development studies should reach the farmers and the villagers from the laboratories,” he added.

The new Kolkata campus of IIT-KGP will be set up in New Town Rajarhat on a sprawling 10-acre land. Sanjiv Goenka, the chairman of the board of directors, said: “Rs 250 crore will be spent and 2,000 students will study in the institute.”

The new campus will aim at providing inter-disciplinary structure to incubation programmes, advanced research and development activities, as also short-term continuing education programmes. It will focus on information technology, VLSI & embedded systems, media and communication technologies, information assurance and security, urban and regional informatics, human resources management & business administration, bio-informatics and similar programmes.

Mrinal Sen, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, P C Sorcar and principal of Presidency College, Mamata Ray, were present at the programme.

Bhattacharjee highlighted the importance of institutes like the IIT-KGP in the race for globalisation. He informed of other higher educational institutes soon to come up in the state.

“There is only one university in North Bengal. We have requested Montek Singh Ahluwalia to allocate funds for this purpose in the next plan. We realised the need for a premier business school in the city and accordingly Sanjiv Goenka is setting up one here,” he said.

Goenka said the construction of the business school, to be situated at Judges Court Road in Alipore, will commence in a few weeks. Bhattacharjee even had a talk with Anil Ambani and requested him to set up an information technology institute on the lines of the Dhirubhai Ambani Memorial Information Technology Institute set up in Kalyani.

S K Dubey, director of IIT-KGP, in his vote of thanks, said that the new campus will have a research and development centre that will interact with industries in Bengal and also assured the chief minister of taking up different projects for development in both the rural and urban belts.

Source- The Indian Express, Dated, November-08,2006

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