Prof Sanjeev K Aggarwal, director, BITS Pilani, Goa, speaks with Sangeeta Yadav about the institute’s vision, challenges, research work and multi-disciplinary training
What is the vision of BITS, GoaIJ
Our vision 2020 is to be among the top, research-driven universities in Asia. Currently we are planning to take the institute forward. The agenda at this point is how do we become one of the leading institutes in the country in terms of research and post graduate students. We are doing pretty well as far as UG programmes are concerned but in the PG space, we are faced with a challenge and that’s where our energies will be directed to.
Tell us about the challengeIJ
There are three major challenges — getting the right faculty, right post graduation students and huge amount of funds which are coming in but not as much as we would like it to be. To get workable funds, we need to showcase our work. Once our faculty and students start getting visible in the research and forum sector, the money will start to pour in.
Private university means university which is almost 100 per cent funded by students. But that’s not the case with us. We can’t charge money to from our masters and PhD research students. Instead we pay them. Our PhD researchers’ costs five times higher than the UG students in terms of facility we need to provide. The masters students’ would be three times higher than UG students. Thus, the source of funds has to be external research funding and getting that in India especially in such high competition, requires a lot of effort.
What is the intitution’s USPIJ
When BITS Pilani was founded our major focus was on quality academic education and research work and to provide flexibility in learning. We made sure that we can get people from the non science and engineering backgrounds who can contribute and complete their masters and PhD. In the humanities stream we have a five year economics programme.
We aim to provide multi-disciplinary training not just in the research field which the student opts for but we would like to prepare them in spirituality, managing people, team work, finances, human management, etc. Another activity we would to explore in a big way is entrepreneurship so that our students will be able to start their own entity which will take the idea forward. At BITS, students are learning something which would be relevant for the rest of their life.
How do you define researchIJ
Research is not just something which is conducted in a lab by highly qualified people wearing a white coat. Research is what everyone does in some way. But the only drawback is we have not been able to convert that in production. What we are attempting in BITS is that we are trying to focus on something which will increase the quality of human life and solve problems of the society in the process of invention. But what gets created also includes bigger side effects.
At present what all research work is going on in BITSIJ
There are three major fields which we are targeting now—water, waste and energy management. It’s true that the way we are wasting our resources the next world war will be fought over it. Our aim is to reduce waste management, effective use of energy and solve problems of wider nature.
Any plans of expansionIJ
We plan to expand the seats by 70 per cent. last year, we had good number of applicants around 1,66,000 out of which 2,200 students were selected.
What is the student teacher ratioIJ
The student teacher ratio is 1:19 but we are trying to make it 1:13. With the help of BITS Connect 2.0 a new model for multi-campus education, we aim to reach out to large number of student.