New Delhi:  Addressing shortage in faculty resources by grooming PhD scholars as future faculty, preparing  a road map for building brand IIIT, and enhancing intake of foreign students up to 15% as per the existing regulations are major decisions taken in second meeting of Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Council. The Council meeting was chaired by Union Minister of Human Resource Development Prakash Javadekar yesterday on 13 July 2016.

Other decisions taken at the chair meeting are as followed: providing enough flexibility in statutes to retain talent as faculty and researchers; as an interim measure, IIITs under PPP model to apply for the status of Deemed University; and separate bill to be prepared to govern the affairs of IIITs (PPP). Further, the chair meeting has decided to set up IIIT Secretariat at IIIT, Gwalior and allow MOOCs along with a system of discussion, assessment and evaluation as credit / audit courses.

To build robust talent pipeline and faculty resources system in IIITs, the chair meeting has broadly decided to take two steps: PhD scholars will be groomed as future faculty and changes will be made in statutes and norms to retain talent as faculty and researchers.

Addressing the meeting, the minister said that the IIIT’s curriculum needs to be updated to meet the evolving Information Technology scenario. “We must become real power in software by innovating such new possible utilities,” he said adding that each IIITs should strive to become ‘centre of excellence’ in the next 3-5 years. Noting that there are two streams of IIITs – some government funded and some under Public-Private Partnership, the Minister said all the IIITs should work together and share among themselves best experiments and practices.

Mr Javadekar, however, pointed out that though India is known as a software giant, it has not come out with popular IT tools like Google, WhatsApp, Facebook or Twitter.