IIT Kolkata campus to house 2,000

KOLKATA: IIT Kharagpur, is preparing to set up a Rs 250-crore Kolkata campus in Rajarhat, for which it has acquired 10 acres at New Town. West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee will unveil the foundation stone on November 7.

“The campus is expected to be ready in the next four-five years. At optimum capacity, it will house 2,000 students, though the first batch will get admitted in 2008,” Sanjiv Goenka, chairman, board of governors, IITKGP told reporters.

“It will have day-boarding facilities as well, which is not an option available to students on the Kharagpur campus,” he added.

The new Kolkata campus will aim to provide an inter-disciplinary structure to incubation programmes, advanced research and development activities as well as short-term education programmes.

“The new campus will focus on information technology, VLSI and embedded systems, media and communication technologies, information assurance and security, urban and regional informatics, human resources management and business administration and bio-informatics,” said Prof M Chakraborty, deputy director, IITKGP.

According to Mr Goenka, the larger IIT presence in Kolkata will facilitate a far greater number of people by providing options to those interested in pursuing part-time programmes.