IIT Ropar featured among top 5 new IITs this year

New Delhi: The Indian Institute of Technology Ropar has had a successful 2017. The institute had various achievements this year and has made a mark in the field of research, innovation, and academics. The institute was ranked 3rd among the new IITs in overall category and 5th in engineering category in the 2017 edition of the NIRF Rankings by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India.

New Campus:

Moving to the new campus has been the top priority for the Institute. The State-of-the art campus, spread across 500 acres, situated on the bank of river Sutlej, will be operational in 2018. The Phase 1A building comprising of 8500 sq. m. will be completed by early 2018. The institute is committed to finish construction of 2.5 million sq. ft. by the mid of 2019 at a budgeted expenditure of 1231cr., accommodating 2650 students, nearly 250 faculty members and adequate staff.

Academics:

During the current year, the Institute witnessed an increase in the number of students from 820 to 1120 and increase in the faculty strength from 84 to 115. A special off-shore recruitment team visited UK, US, Canada, Australia and Singapore in order to recruit faculty. The undergraduate intake also increased from 155 to 260 this year.

In 2017, institute started B. Tech. program in Chemical Engineering, M. Tech. programs in Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Engineering and is further planning to start a new program in Metallurgy and Materials Engineering from the next academic year.

Besides, various GIAN courses with experts from different countries were organized which saw an enormous success in terms of participations as well as collaboration opportunities as a result, the institute has successfully conducted 6 GIAN Courses on Mechanobiology, Robotic Systems, Data Driven Kinematic Synthesis, Biomimetics, Surface Engineering and Fatigue Mechanics.

Research:

IIT Ropar is known for the quality of research which is an integral part of the institute’s vision. The quality of research and its impact can be ascertained from the average citation per paper which stands at 8.23 which is highest among all new IITs as per the Scopus data. There is a steady rise in the number of research scholars which stands at 284 today with 119 scholars joining during the last year. During the current year, faculty members and scholars published 230 journal papers in high impact international journals. The Institute is constantly upgrading the research infrastructure with sophisticated research equipments catering not only to the research scholars at IIT Ropar but also to a large number of institutions in and around Punjab to promote research culture in the region.

Awards:

This year the faculty members and students at IIT Ropar have won a number of national awards. The foremost of them are “NASI-SCOPUS young scientist award” awarded to Dr. Rajendra Srivastava of Department of Chemistry in the field of Chemistry; “NASI young scientist platinum jubilee award” awarded to Dr. Durba Pal of Center for Biomedical Engineering, in the field of Biomedical, Molecular Biology and Biotechnology and Dr. Narinder Singh has been awarded with Prof. S. S. Sandhu Medal by Indian Chemical Society, Kolkata in the field of Environmental and Analytical Chemistry on 53rd convention of Indian Chemical Society held at Visakhapatnam. Mr. Gurvinder Pal Singh Sodhi, PhD student, received best presentation award in the International Conference on Innovative Engineering Materials (ICIEM 2017) held at Philadelphia, USA. Recently, Mr. Navin Kumar, PhD scholar from Physics department has secured Bhaskara Advanced Solar Energy (BASE) fellowship.

Placements:

The Institute’s performance in the campus placements is going up continuously for the last couple of years. The Institute has received an overwhelming response from the industry in general and core industries at campus recruitments, resulting in 83.16% of students being placed this year. More than 90% of Computer Science Engineering, close to 80% of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering students have been placed through campus interviews. An average package of about 11.48 lakhs per annum was offered to students this year.

Some of the renowned companies participating in the campus recruitments included Amazon, Microsoft, Arista Networks, Tata Motors, Mahindra & Mahindra, Larsen & Toubro, Cognizant, Nagarro, Nucleus Software, HCL, etc.

A good number of summer internship opportunities were also offered to the students this year by national as well as international organizations. A total of 11 students took international assignments in University of Southern Buffalo (USA), National University of Singapore, NIIMS Programme (Japan), Phillips (Netherlands), Fuji Films (Japan), SMS Data-Tech (Japan), Tonichi Instatsu (Japan), Otsuka Pharmaceutical (Japan), Accenture (Poland) and Wiezmann Institute of Sciences (Israel).

The Training and Placements department of IIT Ropar is working hard to increase student placement opportunities by establishing a Centre for Career Development which will train students in communication and soft skills.

Research Projects

The faculty members of IIT Ropar are actively engaged in various research projects funded by the institute and external funding agencies. Since its inception, research projects have been sponsored to faculty members of the Institute by different funding agencies like DST, CSIR, DRDO, DAE, RuTAG, DST-GITA, UAY Scheme, Indian National Science Academy (INSA), INDO-MAXICO, IMPRINT, IUSSTF Scheme etc. Presently, the Institute received 155 projects with an outlay of Rs. 50.59 crores.

International Collaborations:

A delegation from the Institute led by the Director, successfully completed its 2nd overseas tour for research collaborations. The team travelled to Australia and Singapore with an objective of building strong international research collaborations with universities and research institutes and build relationships with the Indian diaspora. The delegation visited Macquarie University, Sydney; Australian National University, Canberra; Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Canberra; University of Canberra; Swinburne University, Melbourne; University of New South Wales, Sydney; National University of Singapore and Nangyang Technological University, Singapore. The team discussed the prospects of building a strong research collaboration in areas such as Biomedical Engineering, Affordable healthcare, Telecommunication, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Nanoelectronics, Medical Image Processing, Big data and data analytics, Water and Environmental Science, Sports Technologies, Civil Engineering and Material Sciences. During the tour, the delegation also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the University of New South Wales.

Convocation:

A total of 160 degrees were awarded this year. 118 B.Tech., 11 M.Tech., 18 M.Sc. and 13 PhD degrees were handed out to students. There was a 22 percent increase in the number of students graduating this year as compared to last year.
Mission Vision & Motto:

The most important landmark of this year for IIT Ropar have been the adoption of Mission, Vision and Motto of the institute which read as:

· Mission: To foster a transformative learning environment and a culture of excellence enabling creation of knowledge and development of socially responsible, enterprising leaders contributing significantly to national progress and humanity

· Vision: To be a trendsetter among the technology universities born in this millennium

· Motto: धियो यो न: प्रचोदयात्- (deploy our intellect on the right path)

This has been adopted through an elaborative procedure participated enthusiastically by an overwhelming 70% of the internal stakeholders such as faculty, students and staff and other stakeholders such as Ministry, Members of BoG and other agencies.