IIT Indore plans bigger batches, new courses
Indian Institute of Technology Indore (IIT Indore) will increase the batch sizes of three of its existing undergraduate programmes to 60 from 40. It also plans to roll out BTech in civil engineering and material and metallurgical engineering with 40 students in each stream from the coming academic year 2016-17.
Currently, the institute offers electrical engineering, computer science engineering and mechanical engineering to batches of 40 students each.
Set up in 2008-09, Indore is one of the latest IITs to move to a permanent campus in Simrol after operating out of IET building, PACL campus and Simrol for almost five years. “We can give you a litany of the hurdles and obstacles we faced as a new institution and enumerate each of our struggles with respect to bureaucracy, finance and the rest of it. Dwelling on them is not the IIT Indore way. We prefer to focus on how far we have come and how much further we need to go,” says Dr Nirmala Menon, faculty media coordinator, IIT Indore. There are three buildings that are complete and occupied. All academic activities take place now on a single campus. The student hostels will also move to the new campus in the current semester. Currently, the institute bus takes them to Simrol for their classes, labs and other academic activities. Fully functional cafeterias on campus, libraries and other facilities ensure that their day on campus is well taken care of.
The institute currently has 80 full time Phd faculty members, 480 undergraduate, 378 PhDs and more than 400 postgraduate students. “We have come a long way in increasing the quality of student intake. From taking in students with JEE ranks 3000s we now currently have students with ranks in 1238,” says Menon. IIT Indore was in news in 2015 when a BTech (final year) student of computer science bagged a ` 1.7 crore package from Google.
IIT Indore started functioning in the academic year 2008-09 along with IITs at Hyderabad, Gandhinagar, Patna, Bhubaneswar, Jodhpur and Ropar.