 "Devang Khakhar, Director, IIT Bombay")
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B) is now seeing more number of students looking to set up their own ventures rather than join companies. In an interview with M Saraswathy on the sidelines of the Make in India week, Devang V Khakhar, director of IIT Bombay talks about this phenomenon and the way forward. Excerpts:
Industry-academia partnership is being stressed upon. What are the steps which IIT-B has taken for this and what can others do?
As an educational institution, we have to spend our time to teach and doing research, but at the same time, we have to make these connections with industry as well. For this, you need some support systems within.
We interact with about 350 firms every year and have several partnerships with companies for innovation and research. Institutes can start small, start with training, education and slowly this can be built up to research and development. However, it takes time to build up.
Is IIT Bombay also focussing on getting more postgraduate students?
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The focus is on postgraduate students and research. Now, we have more than half of students in the postgraduate level. As part of their curriculum, they are heavily involved in research and thesis as well.
There has been a pending proposal to hike fee at IITs. Has a decision been taken?
On this issue, there the discussions are still going on. Nothing has been finalised yet.
While placements have traditional been good at IIT-B, a lot of your students have been budding entrepreneurs. Does this trend continue this year as well and does SINE play a big role in this?
Though our students are getting well placed, a lot of them are looking at setting up startups as well. Our startup incubator Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE) is very restrictive since it takes only those (startups) that have high technology component and they have limited space.
At the most, they can take 17 companies at a time. Each company stays for two to three years and we can take three to four companies every year. But the startups are far more than that, so they go out and start it.
IIT-B had plans of new construction activities at the campus. Have the funds been allocated from the ministry for this?
With respect to construction, we have a lot of plans. But, we’ll have to plan on how to start it, once we are sure of the funds. At present, discussions are going on.
