IIT-Delhi seeks to ‘partner’ with Parliament

Rangan Banerjee, Director, IIT-Delhi on Friday said that the institute would like to become a “knowledge partner of Parliament” and has sent across a proposal via the Education Ministry that groups of professors at IIT-Delhi could engage with MPs on pressing issues like like pollution, and climate change.

Speaking at an interaction ahead of the 53rd Annual Convocation Ceremony of IIT-Delhi to be held on Saturday, Mr. Banerjee said, “The proposal is still being worked out but we want to have this partnership as it will give an insight into what issues are important to our policy makers and the type of research that we can conduct on those issues.”

Abhijit Banerjee, Nobel Laureate, Economic Sciences 2019 and Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), will be the chief guest on the occasion, Mr. Banerjee announced.

Speaking about infrastructural developments this year, the IIT-Delhi Director said that three centrally air-conditioned student hostels, named Dronagiri, Saptagiri and Sahyadri, have been constructed and students have been on-boarded. He added that the board of governors has given approval for construction of five new infrastructure projects amounting to ₹680 crore, which include a girls hostel, boys hostel, academic block, staff and faculty housing.

Mr. Banerjee said the last placement season at IIT-Delhi, in the academic year 2021-22, broke all previous records. “Over 1,300 job offers were received from over 600 companies, offering more than 1,000 job roles to final year students. Also, over 830 internship offers were received by the non-final year UG students from over 200 companies. This is the highest ever number of offers received by the students through the Institute’s Office of Career Services (OCS) for both placement and internship,” he said.