Kalpana Chawla Chair at PEC varsity in Chandigarh

With the objective of providing technology solutions in rail projects which are often outsourced to western countries, Railways today instituted Kalpana Chawla Chair on geospatial technology at PEC University at Chandigarh.
The objective of the Chair is to encourage research activities in geospatial technology and to strengthen Indian Railways, especially railway projects where use of remote sensing data, Global Positioning System (GPS) and Geographical Information System (GIS) is predominant.
This will help Indian Railways to develop in-house solutions to the problems which are often outsourced to western countries, Minister of State for Railways Manoj Sinha said after the Railways signed a MoU with Punjab Engineering College University of Technology for creation of the Chair.

He said updated technology promises safe railway operations and so in the recent years the role of technology has been recognised by Railways to remove technological and engineering-related problems.
In order to promote research in geospatial technology, the Chair was announced in the current Rail Budget.
Sinha said collaboration between the two organisations will help in developing applications to remove day-to-day engineering and technological problems and provide geospatial solutions for Indian Railways.

Railways would provide a corpus of Rs 10 crore to PEC University of Technology towards setting up and to meet the running expenses of this Chair.
The Chair will be headed by VK Gupta, Member Engineering as Chairman and Manoj Arora, Director, PEC University of Technology, as co-chairman. The Chair will function through a Chair Core Committee (CCC) having members from Railways and PEC.

This academic chair is being instituted to honour the contributions of late Chawla, an Indo-American astronaut and alumnus of PEC who was the first woman of Indian origin in space.