NIT Agartala to confer D.Sc on CERN chief

National Institute of Technology (NIT) Agartala will confer an honorary Doctor of Science degree on CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer and eminent scientist Bikash Sinha later this week, an official said Monday.

President Pranab Mukherjee will be the chief guest at the fifth convocation ceremony at the institute, the official said.

"The president would give the convocation speech at the NIT on Friday and award medals and degrees to the students. He would also confer the honorary Doctor of Science degree on Heuer and Sinha," NIT registrar Sumanta Chakrabarti told IANS.

"We are also trying to initiate some collaborative works with the world's largest particle physics laboratory (known by its acronym CERN in French)," he added.

The Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, is based in CERN in Switzerland.

India's eminent scientist and Homi Bhabha, as also Bikash Sinha, have also been associated with CERN.

Chakraborti said that this is the first time that the NIT, Agartala would confer the honorary D.Sc to a foreign scientist after the Tripura engineering college turned into a national institute in 2006.

The NIT Agartala is ranked at the 10th position among the 30 NITs in India.

Mukherjee would arrive here Thursday on a two-day visit. During this tour he would inaugurate the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation's first commercial power project in the country in southern Tripura.

State-owned ONGC has set up the 726 MW capacity gas-based power plant at Palatana, 60 km south of here, at a cumulative cost of Rs.10,000 crore.

The president will also address the 10th convocation of the Tripura University Thursday.

This would be Mukherjee's third visit to the northeastern states and maiden trip to the Left-ruled state after he became president in July last year.

He visited Manipur, Sikkim, Assam and Nagaland in April-May this year.