By IANS,
Bangalore : The Rs.150,000-crore Tata group will donate funds for a new facility and discipline at the century-old Indian Institute of Science (IISc) here, group chairman Ratan N. Tata said Wednesday.
“The fund will be in addition to the annual grant the Tata group gives to the institute. We will announce the amount when we decide it, which will be our contribution to the institute’s new century,” Tata said at IISc’s valedictory function.
He also said the Tata group would contribute to the institute’s expansion plans, including the setting up of a new campus in about 100 acres at Chitradurga, about 200km from here.
In his valedictory address on the day the institute was born in 1907, Tata advised the faculty and students to keep pace with a world which is changing fast and where rigid boundaries are disappearing.
“India has given human capital to the world. Apart from embracing new technologies, we must reinvent to keep pace with the changing times and meet the needs of this century. The institute should seek to differentiate from others and not to rest on its laurels.”
Citing how corporations were finding new ways to remain globally competitive through multi-tasking, multi-locations and multi-disciplines, Tata said IISc should embrace such an innovative culture instead of functioning in silos over the years.
“The responsibility lies with all of us, including faculty, students and others associated with this great institute. I hope the multi-disciplinary and multi-tasking approach in science and technology will also bring about such a change by demolishing the silos, barriers and hierarchies in which we have been functioning,” Tata, who is president of the institute’s court, noted.
Lauding IISc’s contribution to science and technology over the last century, he said the faculty and students should be given more freedom to dream and create new things in the new century, as it was out of dreams that sparks of excellence came out.
Paying tributes to the institute’s founder and his great grandfather Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, who conceived the “university of research” in the late 19th century, Tata said the best way to fulfil his dream was reinventing for the next 100 years.