IIT Kharagpur faculty to fight it out for grants
Students competing for grade points, internships and placements is common in IIT Kharagpur. But now even faculty members of the institute will be racking their brains to come up with the best research idea and fight it out for grants to the tune of Rs 50 crore.
Never before has IIT Kgp seen such heightened activity, at least among faculty members. While all these years students competed with each other for grade points, internships and placements, this time faculty members will be seen wracking their brains to come up with the best research idea. The institute has thrown open a grand competition where a jackpot of Rs 50 crore has been unleashed, to be grabbed by the faculty for original research ideas.
While the old schemes will continue to run as they are, under the grand new competition, the best ideas will be rewarded with grants of the kind that the institute has never seen in its 53-year-old existence. The reason behind this novel initiative that the competition has started in this oldest institute of the IIT chain is to infuse enthusiasm into the faculty, encourage original research that might lead to patents and inventions and attract new faculty members to join the institute.
At the moment, IIT-Kgp has 550 faculty members and there is a vacancy for 450 posts. The oldest IIT in the country is finding difficult to fill up these vacancies since the best engineering students are either joining the industry or opting for higher studies.
According to plan, there will be more than 20 competitive seed challenge grants of Rs 25 lakh each for assistant and associate professors in their areas of specialization, four open competitive seed challenge grants of Rs 1 crore each for inter-disciplinary and basic sciences and two grand challenge seed grants of Rs 2.5 crore each. This apart, there will be at least five competitive seed grants of Rs 2.5 crore each for departments to propose an area of emerging thrust.
"We want our faculty to come up with path-breaking ideas with social impact. We want innovations that can immediately leave our laboratories and bring about some change in the daily lives of people. Hence we have thrown open these competitions among the faculty. We are encouraging collaborative research so that better ideas come forth," explained PP Chakraborty, the new director of the institute.
The idea of collaborative research has worked wonders in the institute. For instance, a collaborative research has been undertaken between the faculty members of computer science and geology who would put their technologies and intellectual skills together to study climate change data of the past 100 years and come up with the pattern for the next 100 years.
Similarly, the institute can help the Centre with its food security plans by providing nutritional and biotechnological knowhow along with storage strategy that can prevent decay, said faculty members who are about to offer this idea for the competition. Another group is trying to apply nano science to the technique of filtration so that it can be applied to everything, right from waste to water and blood.
Never before has IIT Kgp seen such heightened activity, at least among faculty members. While all these years students competed with each other for grade points, internships and placements, this time faculty members will be seen wracking their brains to come up with the best research idea. The institute has thrown open a grand competition where a jackpot of Rs 50 crore has been unleashed, to be grabbed by the faculty for original research ideas.
While the old schemes will continue to run as they are, under the grand new competition, the best ideas will be rewarded with grants of the kind that the institute has never seen in its 53-year-old existence. The reason behind this novel initiative that the competition has started in this oldest institute of the IIT chain is to infuse enthusiasm into the faculty, encourage original research that might lead to patents and inventions and attract new faculty members to join the institute.
At the moment, IIT-Kgp has 550 faculty members and there is a vacancy for 450 posts. The oldest IIT in the country is finding difficult to fill up these vacancies since the best engineering students are either joining the industry or opting for higher studies.
According to plan, there will be more than 20 competitive seed challenge grants of Rs 25 lakh each for assistant and associate professors in their areas of specialization, four open competitive seed challenge grants of Rs 1 crore each for inter-disciplinary and basic sciences and two grand challenge seed grants of Rs 2.5 crore each. This apart, there will be at least five competitive seed grants of Rs 2.5 crore each for departments to propose an area of emerging thrust.
"We want our faculty to come up with path-breaking ideas with social impact. We want innovations that can immediately leave our laboratories and bring about some change in the daily lives of people. Hence we have thrown open these competitions among the faculty. We are encouraging collaborative research so that better ideas come forth," explained PP Chakraborty, the new director of the institute.
The idea of collaborative research has worked wonders in the institute. For instance, a collaborative research has been undertaken between the faculty members of computer science and geology who would put their technologies and intellectual skills together to study climate change data of the past 100 years and come up with the pattern for the next 100 years.
Similarly, the institute can help the Centre with its food security plans by providing nutritional and biotechnological knowhow along with storage strategy that can prevent decay, said faculty members who are about to offer this idea for the competition. Another group is trying to apply nano science to the technique of filtration so that it can be applied to everything, right from waste to water and blood.
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