Bhubaneswar: The IIT-Bhubaneswar got the approval to as many as 11 research proposals out of the 25 submitted to the Ministry of Human Resources Development (HRD) worth Rs 6.18 crore under a new initiative by the ministry.
The initiative ‘Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration’ (SPARC), promoted by the HRD Ministry, is aimed at improving academic and research collaborations between Indian institutions and the best of institutions in the world to jointly solve problems of national and international relevance.
Revealing more about the initiative, IIT-Bhubaneswar Director R V Raja Kumar said, “SPARC will help us forging new relations with reputed research groups across the globe. At IIT-Bhubaneswar we have been encouraging our faculty members to forge such relationships and hence there has been very enthusiastic response towards submitting proposals.”
The 11 approved proposals are in the key areas such as green and renewable technologies, affordable healthcare, energy and water sustainability, advanced sensors, electronics communications, and technologies for forensics, security and safety.
The SPARC grants will help the premier institution to collaborate with international universities from the U K, USA, Singapore and New Zealand along with world-class faculties and researchers from across the globe to undertake joint research and offer short-term courses to the students.
“Some of the very notable universities with which IIT-Bhubaneswar through SPARC will partner are University of Dundee, Brunel University, UK, University of Minds, Chicago, University of Minnesota, University of California, New York University, USA, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and the University of Auckland, New Zealand,” Kumar added.
Meanwhile, IIT-Kharagpur has been given the responsibility of being the national coordinator with other nodal Institutes of India and has invited a lot of proposals from all the IITs. The scheme plans to support about 600 such joint collaborations across 100 Indian institutions over a period of two years with a total budget of Rs 418 crore.