To be set up at Bangalore by likes of Nandan Nilekani and Jamshyd Godrej, it will train people manage challenges thrown up by rapid urbanisation
Bangalore: With over 625,000 villages, rural India still dominates the country's landscape even as rapid urbanisation is throwing up challenges for planners.
To train people manage this massive social transformation and fill the critical human resource and knowledge gap, a group of eminent Indians is setting up a university.
One of them, Nandan Nilekani, a co-founder of India's IT bellwether Infosys who now spearheads the massive exercise of providing billion Indians a unique identification number, and his wife Rohini, have just gifted Rs 50 crore to the proposed varsity.
Called the Indian Institute of Human Settlement, the institute is coming up near Bangalore and the people behind it are in talks with the government for recognition of its courses.
Besides Nilekani, other leading figures forming the board of directors of the venture are renowned industrialists and academicians like Xerxes Desai, Jamshyd Godrej, Cyrus Guzder, Renana Jhabvala, Vijay Kelkar, Keshub Mahindra, Kishore Mariwala, Rahul Mehrotra, Rakesh Mohan, Nasser Munjee, Deepak Parekh, Shirish Patel, Aromar Revi and Deepak Satwalekar.
The IIHS will offer "globally benchmarked Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral degrees in urban practice based on a wide set of disciplines and practice areas central to India's urban transformation," Aromar Revi, its director, told IANS in an interview.
The Bachelors in Urban Practice (BUP) programme "will be a four-year course, after the plus-2 level of schooling. The MUP programme will be a two year course," said Revi, an alumnus of IIT-Delhi and the Law and Management schools of Delhi University.
The IIHS will begin by offering the masters programme first from July next year, provided the government gives regulatory clearances by that time, he said.
"Discussions are active with the government on getting the appropriate regulatory clearances," Revi said.
The "tentative fee structure for the MUP is in the range of Rs 300,000 and Rs 400,000 per annum," he said.
The IIHS "is planning to offer up to 50 per cent of its students' scholarships and financial assistance of varying degrees depending on need," he added.
The IIHS is coming up on a 54-acre site in Kengeri, on the Bangalore outskirts. "Work on planning the first phase of the 42,000-sq metre campus has started. It will be executed in a phased manner over the next five to seven years," Revi said.
On what prompted the setting up of this institute, he said there was a need to fill "a critical human resource and knowledge gap in addressing multiple challenges of urbanisation".
The IIHS has tie-ups with several well-known institutions, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University College London (UCL), and The African Centre for Cities (ACC) of the University of Cape Town (UCT), Revi said.
Source: igovernment
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