IIT-Bhubaneswar To Partner With Eight Global Varsities Under SPARC

Bhubaneswar: To improve the academic and research collaboration between IITs, the Indian Institute of Technology-Bhubaneswar will collaborate with eight global universities.

The collaboration programme will be carried out under the ‘Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration’ (SPARC) of Ministry of Human Resources Development (HRD). It aimed at further improving the academic and research collaborations between Indian institutions and the best of institutions in the world to jointly solve problems of national and international relevance.

Some of the notable universities with which  IIT  Bhubaneswar will partner through SPARC are University of Dundee, Brunel University, UK, University of  Illinois,  Chicago,  University of Minnesota,  University of California, New York University, USA, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

IIT Kharagpur has been given the responsibility of being the national co-ordinator with other nodal institutes of India and has invited a lot of proposals from all IITs.

The scheme plans to support about 600 such joint collaborations across 100 Indian institutions over a period of two years with a total budget of Rs 418 crore.

IIT,  Bhubaneswar got the approval of as many as eleven research proposals out of the 25 submitted. While the review process is currently on for other projects, these approved projects got a technical nod and sanction of Rs.6.18 crore.

IIT Director, Prof RV Raja Kumar said, “The SPARC programme will certainly enable us in forging new relationships with reputed research groups across the globe and I compliment the Ministry for providing this kind of an opportunity to the institutions.”