IIT Delhi Director Unhappy with Scrapping of Vishwajeet Scheme

Director of Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, Mr. Ramgopal Rao has expressed his disappointment with regards to the scrapping of the ambitious VIshwajeet project of the HRD Ministry especially at a point when all the seven IITs were really looking forward to its implementation.

The Finance Ministry has turned down the proposal for initiating the project as only a few IITs managed to feature only in the list of top 500 institutes across the world with a rank of more than 200. If supported financially through the Vishwajeet scheme, the IITs could have performed better and made it the top 100, he added.

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Mr. Ramgopal Rao is confident that IIT Delhi could make it to the list of top 100 institutes in the next three to four years if the government comes up with various schemes similar to project Vishwajeet. He requested the HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar to take steps for implementing the project while he was on a visit at the institute on September 12, 2017. Javadekar assured that the ministry will try to bring in agencies on board to kick start the project.

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Under the Vishwajeet project scheme, seven older IITs across the country were entitled to a provision of Rs. 1,250 crore each over a time span of five years. The funding would help these IITs to hire international faculty, collaborate with foreign institutes and upgrade infrastructure. Poor performance in Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings 2018 was the reason for the rejection to Vishwajeet project. None of the IITs managed to find a spot in the list of top 350 institutes across the globe.