By IANS,
New Delhi : Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit Wednesday formally launched the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) and expressed her commitment to make it a world-class institute.
“The government has been giving top priority to promote IT. Setting up of the IIIT in Delhi would give a fillip to acceptability of IT, which has ensured transparency and helped in developing new work culture,” Dikshit told a press conference.
“The Delhi government is committed to help IIIT-D become a world-class institute, one that the whole country can be proud of and one that will attract faculty and students from across the world. This Institute would soon gain international status,” she added.
The institute will begin functioning from this academic year but it will temporarily use facilities provided by the Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology at Dwarka. Its permanent campus will soon come up in Okhla.
It will focus on specific domain areas and on software products, and will be a research-led institute with B.Tech., M.Tech. and Ph.D. programmes.
“Leveraging fully its location advantage, it will look at IT in relation to areas like e-governance, defence applications, life sciences, technology-led education, finance, automobile engineering, and mobile computing,” said a Delhi government spokesperson.
“Its endeavour will be to prepare its students to innovate and create new products for and from the country,” the spokesperson added.
The institute’s board is chaired by Kiran Karnik, a leading IT sector honcho, and it would have Pankaj Jalote, a computer science professor from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, as its founding director.
The board also includes Pheroz Vandrevala, R. Chandrashekar, S. Sadagopan, Ranjit Roy Choudhary and two principal secretaries from the Delhi government.