The news is that the environment ministry has rejected a proposal to divert 80 hectares of forest land to set up an Indian Institute of Technology at Indore.
What happens now. They will have to start looking for land again. As IIT needs 500 acres of land, it will not be easy to find this quantum of land near Indore. They will have to go further away from the city, which means more difficult to attract faculty and visitors. Also, the whole process of land acquisition will take a long time, and it is possible that the first batch of the students will graduate without even knowing where the campus will be.
It is also possible that they may not find this quantum of land anywhere close to Indore, and that will lead to an interesting situation. We may have "IIT Indore" being established at another location. The Honorable Prime Minister has very recently promised an IIT in Kerala. May be he knew about this report then, and may be he felt that "IIT Indore" could be shifted to Trivandrum. This hopefully will satisfy both Kerala and Madhya Pradesh. Both can claim that it is "their" IIT. And such a model may be replicated for all new institutions, satisfying the aspirations of two states with one institution.
Posts
Mr. M. K. Gandhi and Nathuram Godse
3 weeks ago
3 comments:
Dear Prof., I don't understand why do you guys need 500 acres. I did my PhD in IISc and now work in a institute near JNU and IIT Delhi. All these institutes have land ranging from 300-1200 acres which is utterly underutilised. In our country there is going to be land shortage soon if not now. So it is prudent to go vertical. In all these said institutes where I studied or worked the tallest buliding is 10 story. Tell me which is the tallest building in all of IITs?? Don't you think in this era of 100 story skyscapers it is worth builing at least 20 story or taller building even though it may cost bit more but it will conserve something which we won't have or will be able to create in near future ie. land. Bye
@Dr. Das, I have no idea who decided on 500 acres as the land requirement for a new IIT. I also believe that this much land is not needed even for a residential university of size 5,000 to 10,000. However, I look at land as a resource which will be used for funding public institutions in future. It is like when you ask an infrastructure company to build road for free, you give them rights to commercially exploit land next to the road. Same thing for other infrastructure projects, including Metro. I believe that in future, government will not be able to support all IITs, and will allow them to make commercial use of the land to have an alternate revenue stream. From that perspective, it is better to build an IIT a little away from city, where land is cheap today, but will become prone to commercial exploitation after a couple of decades.
hahah any way it is a comedy, ur findings abt moving IIT from indore to Trivandrum is in 2011 . all our various pm's (congress as well as bjp) were giving hopes to keralites for the past 2 decades and it is stil a hope. so dont hope for an IIT, even some states are jealous of geting IITs to states like ours.
Post a Comment