No more engineering colleges, states tell AICTE

Two decades ago, just a percentage of aspiring Indian engineers found a seat in a tech school. Now, supply seems to have outstripped demand, with hundreds of thousands of engineering seats in Indian colleges going abegging. State governments now want the country’s regulatory body to reject fresh proposals for starting any more engineering colleges.

“We have received letters from the Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Haryana and Chhattisgarh governments telling us not to clear proposals for engineering institutes,” said S.S. Mantha, Chairman, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the umbrella body for professional education in the country. Maharashtra, too, said sources, is firming up its pitch to AICTE after waking up to the fact that the number of vacant seats in engineering colleges has risen dramatically over the last three years.

AICTE records show that India produced 401,000 engineers in 2003-04, of which 35% were computer engineers. In 2004-05, 1,355 engineering colleges admitted 460,000 students, of which 31% were computer engineers. The number of graduates rose to 520,000 in 2005-06. In five years, the capacity in technology colleges has more than trebled.

India is now home to 3,393 engineering colleges that have 1.48 million seats available. Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh have about 70% tech institutes. When admissions closed this year, AICTE estimated that nearly 200,000 seats were unfilled.

This glut in engineering seats has had experts worried. This year, AICTE relaxed entry norms for tech schools, hoping there would be a rush of students. But despite lowering the minimum score required to join an engineering college, there weren’t enough students to fill all seats on offer.

“Seats are going vacant in rural parts of various states. There are no takers for specific engineering programmes, but the core engineering courses of civil, mechanical and electrical still have takers,” Mantha added. AICTE has told state governments to pass on copies of perspective plans of all universities, so that the growth of colleges can be mapped and controlled.

Source: The Times of India, October 31, 2011

North Carolina varsity to open India office

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill plans to open an office in India, following in the footsteps of Harvard Business School​ and University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, as it seeks to increase its engagement with Asia’s third largest economy.

The North Carolina university’s Kenan-Flagler Business School will open an office in India within six months, said James Dean, dean of the 92-year-old business school. “The emerging economies are vital for us; and when we talk of this, we mean India, China and Brazil,” Dean said during a visit to Delhi.

“We will open our India office in one of the big cities of India,” he said, hinting that the office could be in Mumbai or New Delhi. The office will increase the university’s interaction with local companies, help it conduct research, carry out case studies and facilitate faculty and student exchanges. The university does not plan a campus in India immediately.

“At least 10% of our classrooms in the US are filled by Indians; hence, we understand the country and its growing stature,” Dean said in a telephone interview. Kenan-Flagler admits 300 students every year. The institute has devised an elective on India and its economy as part of its on-campus full-time MBA course. “For the last few years, nearly 50-60 students including some Indians are coming here for exposure trips. They interact with business houses for few weeks. We want to expand this engagement for sure,” Dean said.

Some students also come to India on student exchange programmes with institutes such as the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), and the Management Development Institute (MDI), Gurgaon, for a term that typically stretches for around three months.

Some weeks earlier, Wharton announced it would open an India office in 2012 and engage in executive education, a revenue churner for business schools worldwide. These programmes target professionals and are delivered as either part-time or full-time courses.

Harvard opened its India Research Center (IRC) five years earlier in Mumbai, from where it drives its executive education agenda as well as its research and case study programmes. The Harvard Business Review, the management magazine it publishes, has tied up with the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, to promote its case studies.

Bharat Gulia, senior manager at consulting firm Ernst and Young, said such moves by leading foreign business schools are only logical as India’s economy continues to grow even in the face of a global economic slowdown. “The practical question is where is the opportunity to grow? Professors need consulting and students need exposure. Here, India is a great place,” he said.

Source: Mint, October 31, 2011

The return of the Lab: Indian biological sciences researchers abroad returning home

Subba Rao Gangi Setty spends much of his time in a small cabin with an old fan whirring above. After arriving in Bangalore in July last year, the cell biologist has set up a lab at the Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology in the Indian Institute of Science to study a disease called the Hermansky-Pudlak Syndrome (HPS), a type of albinism. One of a handful of senior fellows supported by a joint funding programme of the Wellcome Trust, UK, and the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India, Setty, a Green Card holder, returned to a much lower salary and an un-airconditioned office so he could pursue science in India. “I went to government schools and studied on government scholarships. I felt I owed it to my country to come back and do quality science here,” says the 37-year-old from Porumamilla village, Kadappa district, Andhra Pradesh, who spent over a decade in the US — long enough that he now rolls his r’s.

Raring for a change after nine years at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, US, Setty began looking out for opportunities in the biotech industry in 2009. The recession was setting in at the time, but with two Nature papers and several other high-quality publications to his name, he found work at Proteostasis Therapeutics, a small molecule drug company in Boston. For a year, he worked on modulation of cell biological pathways to cure protein folding defects implicated in neurodegenerative diseases. “It was then that I learned about the Wellcome Trust-DBT fellowship. I had been eager to come back to India since 2006, but now, an opportunity presented itself,” he says.

A silver Macbook sits on Setty’s desk. All around, there are piles of boxes. “The department is moving to a new building soon. Hopefully I’ll get more space,” he says. The money here may not compare with what he was making in the US, but a five-year research grant of Rs 4.58 crore fully supports his research programme. (Tissue culture, cell biological reagents and microscopy are pricey). With a newly-put-together team of eight researchers, Setty is now studying protein transport pathways in cells to understand the biology behind HPS and to develop cell biological screens for albinism with lung fibrosis. He has also set up an informal network and support group for people with HPS in India.

“It’s a good time to return to India,” says Vatsala Thirumalai, who leads a group on neural circuits and development at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), a Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) centre in Bangalore. A research scientist at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, till about a year ago, Thirumalai has set up a zebrafish incubator facility at NCBS to study the development of the brain in embryos. Hundreds of these nearly-transparent fresh water fish swim frantically in special tanks in her lab. Zebrafish are widely used in the biotech industry for drug screening, and Thirumalai, during her post-doctoral research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, showed that neural networks for swimming develop very early in zebrafish, but are kept dormant until later.

“Earlier, working in India meant you were cut off. Now, I regularly Skype with my collaborator at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego,” says the 36-year-old, also a Wellcome Trust-DBT India fellow. “Government initiatives like the Ramanujan Fellowship, the Ramalingaswami Fellowship and the DBT-Wellcome Trust Fellowship have helped immensely in attracting talent back to India. Also, India is now a full member of the international Human Frontier Science Program that funds research in life sciences,” she says.

There is a sense among academics that it is easier than ever to obtain funding and forge collaborations in India. A number of factors have contributed to this: cuts in research spend in the US, the Indian Government’s pro-active support to science, a maturing biotech industry, better research output, a new crop of research institutes, and last but not the least, the image of India as an emerging scientific superpower.

Dozens of Indian researchers working in biological sciences are leaving foreign shores for home. This “trickle” of scientists, many of whom own valuable intellectual property, is set to grow considerably in the coming years, says Vijay Chandru, chairman and CEO of Strand Life Sciences—a genomics solutions and bioinformatics company based in Bangalore—and president of the Association of Biotech-led Enterprises (ABLE), a trade body that represents the Indian biotech industry. Chandru, a former computer science professor at IISc, believes that with joint efforts by industry and government, biotech could be the next major ‘reverse brain drain’ sector after IT.

From a small industry in the early 1990s, biotechnology in India has grown to a $4 billion sector of possibility. There are about 350 companies, most of them located in seven clusters across India—Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, Delhi, Ahmedabad and Kolkata. “Since 2003, the industry has been growing steadily at over 20 per cent per annum. If we maintain this, we will be a $100 billion industry by 2025,” says Chandru. This growth could be spurred by demand for biosimilars—a new generation of protein-based drugs that could replace important biopharmaceuticals when they go off patent—and an expanding healthcare industry.

Strand Life Sciences, which has about 130 employees working out of an open-plan fifth-floor office in a business park on Bellary Road, Bangalore, has brought back 25 PhDs from the US in the last few years. “We were looking for people who could work with microarrays and high-tech equipment. So we hired researchers from NIH and other known institutes, mostly through referrals,” Chandru says.

Veena Hedatale is one such hire. A plant geneticist by training and a senior scientist at Strand, Hedatale gave three years to the US pharma industry before she decided to move back to Bangalore, where her family lives. An opportunity in the private sector that kept her in sync with happenings in biopharmaceuticals was just what she needed. “There is a huge difference in salaries between India and the US, but I was prepared for that,” says Hedatale, who just completed two years at Strand and hopes to start a product development company of her own one day.

Sushmita Gowri Sreekumar, another aspiring entrepreneur who joined the company about a year ago after completing a PhD programme in Zurich, says she sees a lot of promise in the Indian biotech sector. “When I decided to come back in June 2009, I knew I’d get a job or start my own diagnostics company. The number of institutes and biotech companies coming up in India is reassuring,” says Sreekumar, who has a PhD in cancer genetics.

FMCG majors like Unilever and ITC, too, are lapping up their share of the diaspora pie, says Amitabha Majumdar, a former post-doc at Cornell University, New York, who took up a position as a cell biologist at Unilever’s Whitefield office in January. “This opportunity was an excellent one. And it came at a time when many of my friends were planning to move back to India,” he says. According to Majumdar, Unilever Bangalore has hired at least four Indians from Yale, Oxford and Johns Hopkins Universities in just the last year. “A few years ago, there weren’t many cell biologists in India. Now I know many in Bangalore who are working in the same areas as I am,” says the 38-year-old who is researching immunity in cells. His wife, who just finished her PhD at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, is all set to join Indian biotechnology major Biocon.

Even as pharma and biotech companies in the West are laying off employees, India is looking for quality researchers to fill positions at new biosciences institutes such as the five Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER), the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute in Faridabad, and the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine (inStem) at NCBS, Bangalore. NCBS alone is responsible for bringing back half-a-dozen researchers in the last couple of years.

John Mercer, a professor at McLaughlin Research Institute, Montana, US, moved to Bangalore two months ago to run a high-throughput mice facility at inStem to help understand the molecular bases of inherited cardiomyopathy—a chronic disease of the heart muscle and one of the leading causes of cardiac death. “I see potential in the willingness of the Indian Government to invest in research. From my perspective, the US and Europe are turning away from their commitment to research and education while India’s commitment is increasing,” he says. The project, a collaboration between inStem, NCBS, Mercer’s home institute and Stanford University, among others, is funded entirely by the Indian Government. Mercer, who plans to stay on for two to five years, says he and his wife Colleen Silan are here for “the opportunity and the adventure”.

“A lot of money is being pumped into scientific infrastructure. It’s a positive sign for those looking to come back,” says Thirumalai. Kundan Sengupta agrees. After a six-year-long association with the National Cancer Institute, NIH, Bethesda, Sengupta moved base to Pune in July 2010. Now an assistant professor at IISER, Pune, the intermediate fellow of the Wellcome Trust-DBT India alliance is investigating how a basic biologic question: how do chromosomes find their correct location within a cell? “The growth of the biotech industry as well as the government’s research-oriented policies have encouraged many abroad to return to both academia and industry in India,” he says.

“It’s not just biotech, all of Indian bioscience is attracting diaspora back to India,” says Archana Purushotham, who moved to Bangalore four months ago to join inStem as a visiting scientist. A stroke specialist with experience in neuroimaging and research at Stanford University, Purushotham says inStem provided her with a unique opportunity. “It has truly been an exploratory expedition. As a practising physician who wants to spend a significant portion of time on research, some of it non-clinical, there is not much precedent in India. So it has been a challenge to blend both my worlds, and I am still in the process of trying to get it to work,” she says.

There are other, less obvious, draws. When Kaustuv Datta completed his Masters course from the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai in 1997, there were few good places in India where he could have pursued a PhD, prompting him to join the University of Michigan in the US. After nine years that he spent acquiring a PhD in molecular, cellular and developmental biology, and then doing post-doctoral research at the University of Michigan and the Scripps Research Institute, Datta returned to India in 2010 to join the University of Delhi as an assistant professor. While there is more money and infrastructure for research in the field now, Datta says it is the freedom to pursue “risky projects” at Indian universities that prompted his return.

“Tenure system is very strict in US universities. At the end of five to seven years as a post-doctoral fellow, you are evaluated on the number of papers published in that time and so on and granted tenure. It is a make or break system and prevents people from taking up risky projects. Universities here provide more secure positions, and independence to take up projects as you wish. This is a place where you can find your own identity as a researcher instead of being a post-doctoral fellow abroad working on someone else’s ideas,” he says.

There are, however, serious challenges to tapping the biotech diaspora. Biotech research entails considerable capital outlay and doesn’t lend itself to entrepreneurship the way IT does. And unlike IT professionals, biotech researchers often do long post-doctoral stints, so by the time they have established themselves and are ready to move back, they are already pushing 40. “Displacement becomes much harder then. The kids are already grown up and they don’t want to move. To come back to India at such a point in one’s life, the terms have to be very attractive,” says Vijay Chandru, speaking from experience. Sitting in her office surrounded by the smells of the lab, Vatsala Thirumalai is hopeful India will get its due. “As Thomas Friedman would say, the world of biosciences is now truly flat,” she says.

Source: The Indian Express, October 30, 2011

IPS officers undergo strategic training at Cambridge

Eighty senior IPS officers in the ranks of Deputy Inspector-General and Inspector-General on Saturday completed their eight-week course in strategic management at the Cambridge University, United Kingdom. The programme was organised in collaboration with the O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU), Sonepat, near the capital.

The participants, in the first six weeks of training at the National Police Academy, Hyderabad, had lecture-workshop sessions twice daily, capped by weekly examinations and assessments, according to a press release issued by C. Raj Kumar, Vice Chancellor, JGU, and Dean, Jindal Global Law School,

In the U.K., the IPS officers visited the Cambridge and Peterborough Crown Courts to discuss the U.K. justice and legal system with judges of the Crown Court. They also got an opportunity to visit the HMP Edmunds Hill and Highpoint Prison.

The programme was conducted by faculty members from both universities and police practitioners from the U.K., the United States and Australia. The contract for this training was offered to the Cambridge and Jindal universities by the Indian Home Ministry, with the object of strengthening the law enforcement mechanism through knowledge-based policing.

The most important and valuable visit during the U.K. leg was to the House of Commons, where the participants had a discussion with the Minister of State for Police and Criminal Justice, Nick Herbert; the Director, Police Reform and Resources, Home office, Stephan Kershaw; and other members of the Home Affairs Select Committee. The participants visited Birmingham, the centre for the West Midlands Police of the U.K., and the Tally Ho training centre, where they had an interaction with the Chief Constable.

Global issues
The issues covered in these presentations included corruption investigation, counter-terrorism, and interrogation methods. Lectures and workshops covered an even broader range of global issues, with the faculty drawn from the U.S., Australia, U.K. and India representing leading universities and major police agencies from around the world.

The concluding session was attended by Professor Lawrence Sherman, Wolfson Professor of Criminology and Director of Police Executive Education at the University of Cambridge, Professor Raj Kumar, Lord Ian Blair, former London Metropolitan Police Commissioner, and Sanjeev P. Sahni, Head of Education, Jindal Group.

Professor Sherman, who is a co-director of the course, said: “The IPS officers showed an impressive interest in advancing the science of policing by conducting pioneering new experiments in crime prevention on the rigorous model of medical clinical trials. With the JGU’s support, the police agencies of India have the best opportunities in the world for producing a geometric increase in the scientific knowledge about effective police practices.”

Evidence-based policing
Professor Raj Kumar said: “I welcome the interest of the IPS officers in the growing field of ‘evidence-based policing’, which is a central focus of our Centre for Penology, Criminal Justice and Police Studies at the Jindal Global Law School.” With the completion of training for the third batch, 300 senior IPS officers of the rank DIG and IG have been trained so far under the mid-career training programme.

Source: The Hindu, October 30, 2011

6,500 Indian students deported from Australia due to Visa irregularities

A recent report in Australian media about the cancellation of a whopping 15,066 visas of foreign students has caused a flutter in India. The largest number of students – around 6,500 – who now face deportation, are Indian. While the media report, which appeared in Australia’s The Daily Telegraph, is based partly on annual figures for 2010-11 published by the Australian government’s Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC), educational consultants and experts in India are not pressing the panic button yet.

Most of them feel that genuine Indian students who comply with the requirements of their visa have no reason to be concerned about deportation. The crackdown by the Australian government, which resulted in a 37% increase in student visa cancellations over the previous year, are part of series of steps being taken to benefit international students and weed out low-quality education service providers.

Many Cases of Visa Expiry
“The visa cancellations have primarily hit Indian students in vocational education training (VET) in Australia who have violated their student visa terms. In some cases, the visas had expired rather than being cancelled. Many Indians joined courses only as a means of getting permanent residence in Australia and were not genuine students,” says Harmeet Pental, Regional Director (South Asia), IDP Education, the largest organisation representing Australian universities.

It appears that around 8,000 of the cancelled student visas were cases of visa expiry when the time period ran out. “Students need to ensure they don’t get into such a situation. Among the visas which were genuinely cancelled by DIAC, over 2,200 occurred because the students withdrew from their courses,” Pental adds.

Even as the DIAC is trying to spruce up the student-immigration process, reforms are also targeted at making things smooth for genuine students. A recent review by former New South Wales minister Michael Knight focuses on a easier visa policy for foreign students.

The Australian government has accepted all the recommendations of the Knight panel that will kick in from the first half of 2012. These include the end of mandatory cancellation of student visas for unsatisfactory attendance, unsatisfactory progress and working in excess of hours allowed. This will allow DIAC to decide cases on individual merit.

Source: The Economic Times (Online Edition), October 30, 2011

Most rural students 2 grades below par in language, maths

Painting a grim picture of the state of primary education in five states of the country, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) has revealed that 53% of the fifth standard children in rural India can read a second standard level text and 36% can solve a three digit by one digit division problem, thereby suggesting that the situation has hardly changed over the six-year period for which ASER data is available.

Further, the report says that children’s learning levels are far behind what is expected of them. Most of them are at least two grades below the required level of proficiency in both language and mathematics. The study conducted by ASER Centre, UNICEF and UNESCO followed about 30,000 children in 900 schools in Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand and Rajasthan for a period of 15 months to see how much they learn in a year and the factors associated with classroom, school and household lead to better learning.

With 13% of the country’s population under six years of age, India’s annual budget for elementary education stands at Rs. 21,000 crore (Rs. 210 billion) and more than 96% of all children are enrolled in school.

The report found that 20% of children surveyed are first generation school-goers and less than half of all households have any print material available so they don’t have materials to read at home. Though children are expected to be able to read simple words in first standard, ASER said that out of more than 11,500 second standard children tested, less than 30% could read simple words and only three out of every 10 children could fluently read third standard text.

“Even in high performing states, both second and fourth standard children have difficulty writing simple words correctly. Less than 20% could solve a one digit addition word problem. Further, while children in fourth standard could comfortably solve basic arithmetic operations, they struggled with word problems which required them to apply this knowledge,” the report noted.

Source: The Financial Express, October 29, 2011

Blacklisting of banks by UK to hit students, co-op banks

Students aspiring to study in the UK are likely to face hardships due to blacklisting of about 1,950 Indian banks by the UK Border Agency for visa-related purposes. Most of the blacklisted banks are cooperatives located in rural and semi urban areas. The parents of students hailing from rural and semi-urban areas have a tendency to maintain accounts in cooperative banks, this will hit them, say experts.

“Now, the students applying for visas will have to rely on a handful of banks in which they may not operate accounts,” Ms. Sridevi, a senior functionary of Visu International Ltd., an agency which offers consultancy in admissions abroad and visa process. The visa applicants will have to attach a financial statement for the purpose of verifying applicants’ maintenance funds under Tier 4 of the points-based system.

The UK Border Agency maintains a list of financial institutions in some countries that do not satisfactorily verify financial statements. This is the first time that a large number of Indian banks have been included in this. The blacklisting has come at a time when students gear up for visas. The semester-based admission season in the UK universities generally takes place in September and January.

The UK is the second major destination for Indian students after the US for courses in sciences, engineering and management. According to data available with leading consultancies, in 2009 UK had granted about 34,000 students visas which had gone up to over 50,000 in 2010.

Surprisingly, many sound banks were also included in this which shocked many. “The blanket blacklisting of this number of cooperatives banks reflects badly on the country’s financial health and regulation globally,” Mr. B.V.R. Sarma, the Greater Bombay Cooperative Bank Ltd., said. Many middle class families are now holding accounts in urban cooperatives and the blacklisting would create “unnecessary hassle”, he said.

There was strong regulation in the country to guard against any kind of frauds/forgeries as alleged by the UK agency, he added. Other known banks including AP Mahesh Cooperative Urban Bank, Pondicherry Cooperative Urban Bank Ltd. and Saurashtra Cooperative Urban Bank Ltd., have also been blacklisted. “The Government should take up this issue of unwarranted, blanket blacklisting with the UK authorities,” said an official of AP Mahesh Bank.

Source: The Hindu Business Line, October 29, 2011

IITs dangle carrots to attract faculty

The IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) might not have reached the sanctioned strength of faculty members to make an ideal report card of 10:1 students-teachers ratio post the capacity expansion, but they are doing all they can to attract best quality talent to their campus. Be it IIT-Delhi (IIT-D), IIT-Bombay (IIT-B), IIT-Kanpur (IIT-K) or new IITs like IIT-Gandhinagar (IIT-Gn), IIT-Hyderabad (IIT-H), institutes are taking measures to attract the next generation of top quality faculty members to their institutes.

From investing in and beefing up the infrastructure in R&D, housing, helping create opportunities for the spouses of faculty members, providing lump sum grants for young faculty for research, building new state-of-the-art sports complex for new campuses, providing up to 25% higher salary through donations for new joinees to offering joining allowances for fresh recruits – institutes are leaving no stone unturned.

As a result, fresh PhDs and post doctorates have started joining the system from some of the best institutes of the world including IITs, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and universities and institutes such as University of Illinois, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology, Max Planck institute, Germany, University of South California, Carnegie Mellon University, Imperial College, London, UK.

“Incentives like these do a world of good in attracting best talent. It is a concerted effort over a period of time that shows results. We are already getting ambitious and high potential candidates who want to work with us,” says Prof. Devang Khakhar, Director of IIT-B.

PLENTY OF ACTION
In the last four years, IIT-D, for instance, hired around 107 faculty members from across the world. To retain them, the institute is investing in better infrastructure. A new housing block of 120 flats for faculty members and their families is being built which will be ready soon. In the next 2-3 years it is planning to set up a central research facility that will house the biggest projects across domains at a cost of Rs. 40-50 crore (Rs. 400-500 million).

To retain the faculty, the institute is trying to create opportunities for teachers’ spouses with requisite qualifications in incubation and entrepreneurship centres as technical staff or wherever there are vacancies, says R K Shevgaonkar, Director, IIT-D. It also aims to introduce an outreach service under faculty mentorship programme, which will create a pool of talent. “The aim is to groom world-class teachers not only for IITs, but engineering institutes in India in general. It will be a two-tier process which will train teachers for IITs and they in turn will help create a pool of faculty for engineering colleges across India,” adds Shevgaonkar.

IIT-B too has investment plans on the same lines. It will invest around Rs. 300 crore (Rs. 3 billion) in the next three years to enhance and augment its current infrastructure with 180 new faculty apartments, lab space, new academic blocks for computer science, nanoelectronics technology, biotechnology and energy. The institute has also cut down on recruitment time with hiring drives being conducted through out the year unlike once a year previously. Now positions get filled within three months of announcing a vacancy, it claims. The institute which has the sanctioned capacity of 800 full-time permanent faculty members and works with 516 faculty members who tutor 8,000 students, however, says it will never hire more than 60 faculty members every year.

“If we are talking about quality, we have to be extremely cautious about who we are hiring. It just cannot be a mad rush to fill up vacancies, but merit of the individual joining IITs,” says Devang Khakhar, Director, IIT-B which hired around 90 people in the last four years. Agrees Sanjay G Dhande, Director of IIT-Kanpur, “There has to be aggressive hiring, but not at the cost of quality. It is extremely essential to see that the candidates we hire have great potential, has done some quality research work and is adept at teaching at institutes like IITs.”

Starting next January, the institute will offer a joining bonus of Rs. 15,000 per month for the first three years to young faculty members. For encouraging research, it has been offering a one time grant of Rs. 2.5 million to fresh joinees along with a faculty fellowship of Rs. 15,000 per month for three years for the best faculty on campus. And all this in addition to their salaries.

INNOVATION AT NEW IITs
One of the new IITs which came up in 2008, IIT-Gn, has devised a plan to reach out to Indian PhD/Post doctorate students, faculty members across United States and Europe to attract them. In December the institute is hosting a conference where 70 PhDs and Post Doctorates from across the world will come together to talk about how IIT-Gn can become a world class organisation. Higher salaries are also on offer. “With donations we have been able to offer up to 25% higher salary to new faculty members. So while an assistant professor might get Rs. 70,000-75,000 in other IITs (the standard package), we are offering Rs. 85,000-90,000 to them,” says Prof. Sudhir K Jain, Director, IIT-Gn.

For its part, IIT-H is betting on its new campus that will come up in 2013 which will provide state-of-the-art housing facilities to its faculty members. It is also building a world class sports complex which is being designed by Japanese architects. Prof. Uday Desai, Director, IIT-H says, “We have invested heavily on research in material science, wireless communication and high performance computer technology. We are also trying to attract donations which can be channelised for the institute’s growth and quality research. It can help us in the long run if more people take interest in building world class knowledge centres.”

Source: The Economic Times, October 28, 2011

Zee Learn to manage schools owned by government, corporate houses

Zee Learn Ltd., the education firm of Essel Group​, plans to enter a new segment — school outsourcing, or managing schools owned by corporate houses or the government. The company said this is a fresh business opportunity at a time when the country’s education sector is growing rapidly and companies from other sectors also want to invest.

Chief executive officer Sumeet Mehta said Zee Learn is in talks to manage a school of steel manufacturer JSL Stainless Ltd. and some other companies. “We are hoping that 20% of our school business will come from this segment. We will focus on operating and managing schools of leading business houses and making it a key vertical to expand,” said Mehta. “We are in touch with at least four-five other corporates.”

India’s kindergarten to class 12 (K-12) segment was worth $20 billion in 2008, private professional colleges $7 billion and tutorial $5 billion, according to a report by consulting firm CLSA.

The cost of school education has doubled between 2005 and 2011, according to the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham). There are at least 240 million students in India pursuing school education, according to data available with the Union government.

Zee Learn runs 900 play schools, 100 K-12 schools and nearly three dozen animation institutes across the country. It recently tied up with Japan’s Gakken Education to improve science learning in classrooms. By the end of the year to March 2012, the company plans to add 100 playschools and 25 each in the other segments.

Mehta said Zee Learn hopes to have 500 K-12 schools in five years, of which 15-20% will be owned by others. Motiprakash Rath, deputy general manager, corporate communication, JSL Stainless, said the company is in talks with Zee Learn. “Organizations like Zee Learn are specializing in education and we believe that the best result can be extracted by giving the right job to the right people,” Rath said.

Analysts said school outsourcing can help education firms sidestep the difficulties of land acquisition. “For any business expansion, land is a major issue and in case of education firms this is definitely one of the concerns. Hence, some K-12 education players find it convenient to partner with those corporate houses or government bodies that have this facility. What they are following is a management service model,” said Bharat Gulia, senior manager, education practice, at consulting firm Ernst and Young.

Mehta agreed that acquiring land is a concern for Zee Learn, and the company won’t mind expanding to smaller cities and towns, where land acquisition is easier. Zee Learn has already tied up with the Gujarat government to manage 25 municipal schools in Ahmedabad, he said. The agreement was signed some months ago and the company will take over operations after Diwali holidays.

The company’s board has approved a proposal to raise $60 million to support its expansion, Mehta said. He did not say how the money will be raised but added that the option of bringing in private equity firms or other investors is “not off the table”. Zee Learn’s revenue grew 40% in the first half of fiscal 2011-12 to Rs. 220 crore (Rs. 2.2 billion), Mehta said. In the second half, it aims to expand 50-60% to nearly Rs. 300 crore (Rs. 3 billion) as it is expecting its order book to grow.

Source: Mint, October 28, 2011

IIM-C widens its net to catch more students

Every year over 200,000 students take the CAT (Common Entrance Test) examination aiming to join the premier management institutions, but only about 3,000 make it. Some enter the IIMs (Indian Institutes of Management), a few more join other premier institutes like IMS, FMS and others. Those who do not clear the examination settle for other private management institutions, or foreign universities, or choose a different profession.

Here is an opportunity for those others to look at online courses offered by the top management institutes of the country. IIM-Calcutta (IIM-C), which is celebrating its golden jubilee this year, declared an ambitious five-year plan to reach out to more students. The institution has already started offering online courses on management, and plans to do this in full measure. “We are the only institute of this repute, 10 per cent of whose revenue is generated through online programmes,” says Shekhar Chaudhuri, Director of IIM-C.

The institute presently houses 462 students. Its strength can be increased to 700 in the coming years. “Yes, we are developing infrastructure to accommodate more students, and our target is to take 500 students this year. But how far can we increase the strength? We cannot accommodate the thousands of students taking the examination,” says Ajit Balakrishnan, Chairman of the board of governors of IIM-C. “It is not economically viable. [On the other hand,] we can certainly educate thousands through online courses.”

There are always apprehensions among students that online courses are not as effective as full-time courses. But here IIM-C is offering Internet-based courses which will enable an online education in real time. They will be in no way inferior to full-time campus courses, says Chaudhuri. “We designed the courses so that the candidate will also be visiting the campus for a few days to learn,” he adds.

IIM-C has about 600 students on its campus every year, plus about 4,500 through its distance programmes. With the introduction of Internet-based models the institute is expecting to add 2,000 more students this year, and reach out to 5,000 more students in coming years. “The courses offered online are socially motivated to reach out to different geographies and different sections of people who would otherwise miss a quality education,” says Sougata Ray, IIM-C’s Dean.

To address the woes of the manufacturing sector, which complains that the best management people enter the service sector, IIM-C is offering a programme titled “Visionary Leadership in Manufacturing,” in collaboration with IIT-Kanpur and IIT-Madras. The institute is also planning to develop a one-year Advanced Teachers Management programme, that will help institutions across the SAARC region to enhance the quality of their management faculties. These teachers will also participate in doctoral programmes at the institute. IIM-C will also tie up with other universities, foreign and Indian, to develop a diverse faculty and student body. It aims to become an International Centre of Excellence in Management Studies.

Source: Business Standard, October 28, 2011