BITS Pilani lines up expansion plans

The Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani, a deemed university, is embarking on an expansion across its India campuses at Hyderabad, Goa and Pilani (Rajasthan).

Under the institute's growth plan ‘Vision 2020, Mission 2012’, announced by its chancellor Kumar Mangalam Birla, it targets to be among the top three institutes in India by 2015 and one of the top 25 institutes in Asia across engineering and sciences courses by 2020.

“We have taken up several initiatives, including appointing task forces, to achieve our target. The initiatives include modernising and building campus infrastructure like hostels and academic buildings, increasing student strength, adding new courses and bringing in new innovative technologies,” VS Rao, director of BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad campus, said.

The growth plans should be implemented over the next three months, he added.

BITS Pilani plans to increase its student strength from 10,500 now to 18,000 across all the campuses. It aims to have 1,500 PhDs from the current 500 by 2015.

Under the mentorship of Birla, the institute is working on an investment plan and is in the process of collecting data from all its campuses. “The outlay may reach close to Rs 1,000 crore to execute the mission,” he said.

“A Rs 400-crore modernisation initiative is already under way at the Pilani campus. It was started a year ago and is in the process of building infrastructure, which is expected to be completed by 2015,” he said. In the last four years, BITS Pilani had invested around Rs 300 crore in the Hyderabad campus alone.

To launch new course on information security
BITS Pilani is planning to start a four-year integrated programme on information security from the 2013-14 academic year. “Information security is going to be a major area in the coming years, as cyber security is emerging as a major threat across the globe,” he said. It will have around 40 students per batch.