IIT Madras targets to have 100 foreign faculties in three years

One of the major challenge is lack of enough industry-academia partnership, says Pawan Goenka

The Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IITM) is planning to attract more foreign nationals as its faculty, targeting a total of 100 foreign faculty in the institute in three years. The institute, which has received an increased fund of Rs 750 crore in the budget for the year, is also looking at increasing its industry-institute collaboration and more funds from the industry in future, said the senior officials from IITM.

The institutes' board in a meeting has approved a plan to increase its foreign faculty level to 100 in the next three years and to maintain in that level for future, said Pawan Goenka, Chairman of the Governing Board of IITM and managing director, Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd.

"The scheme to attract foreign faculty was presented in the board meeting today and it has been approved. Initially the target is to appoint 25 foreign nationals as faculty members," he said. Even the numbers reaches 50-70, it would be beneficial for the institute. He said that one of the major challenges for the institutes is to get adequate, quality faculty and IITM has been doing well in this.

Speaking about the advantage of having foreign faculty, Bhaskar Ramamurthi, Director, IITM said, "Diversity in research. In research, it is always good to have people from different parts of the world, the cultural ways also matters in terms of thinking." The institute currently has around 9,200 students and 600 faculty.

The institute has been allocated with a fund of around Rs 750 crore during the financial year 2017-18, as compared to Rs 450 crore for the previous year and with the budget presentation was fixed by the government on an earlier date this year, the first tranche of this fund is expected to come in soon, which would be helpful for the institute, said Goenka.

One of the major challenge in the segment is lack of adequate industry-academia partnership, he said. The funding of research and development in IITs are mainly from the government, while the industry contribution is a minority share. This has to be reverse for better growth. Mahindra and Mahindra has tied up with IITM to conduct research on four projects, one on electric vehicles, two on engine and another one on light weighting. In its efforts for innovation, the company has invested around Rs 500 crore in development of electric vehicles, an area which has not been explored much, and the company is expected to see the benefits soon.

As far as the funding is concerned, the fund created by the IITM alumni is currently at around Rs 200 crore and is expected to increase to Rs 500 crore.