Professor Manoj Arora. Express Professor Manoj Arora. Express A five-member team of PEC university students is participating in the first annual Spaceport America Cup: Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC) in June. How will it benefit the students? I am proud of the Vigyan group of students for this great achievement, which has happened for the first time in our institute. It is an inter-disciplinary team and that should be the case, if we really want to do challenging projects. Further, the students have collaborated with ISRO and industry as well for this project. The institute is putting a lot of emphasis on industry connect. Fortunately, a number of industries, corporates and alumni are coming to the institute with their intellect in mentoring students and faculty, sponsoring projects in cutting-edge technologies, establishing laboratories and centres of excellence. Very soon, the institute is going to have smart city innovation centre with the support of government, industries and start-ups. This is what is called real academic-government-industry-alumni connect. What are the various efforts made by the university for training the students for such a large programme? The institute supports, both financially and intellectually, all the projects, which have societal impact both at national and regional level. For example, a group of students is assisting UT Administration in carrying out drone mapping for assessment of properties in the city. Another group of students has developed an audio guide for Chandigarh Museum which would be extended to Rock Garden and other such tourist places in the city. The institute is also supporting two start-ups created by two groups of students. One is working on development of Brail Printer for blinds and the team is currently in USA. A US-based company will also support them financially to take the project forward. Another start-up has started working on growing plants using air-phonics, which is a new technique. What are various plans to attract more companies for placement of PEC students? The institute has had good campus placements in the last three years. The average salary package has increased to Rs 8 lakh per annum, which is higher than many of the national institutes of excellence in the country. The number of companies visiting the institute has also increased and currently stands at 120. The pre-placement offers (typically provided to students who undergo internships) has increased and currently stands at 42. However, we are still not able to attract companies providing foreign placements and our PG placements are also low. The institute is aware of this and has taken steps to create a career development and guidance centre, which in addition to working for internship and placements, will facilitate students in choosing right kind of career by organising workshops, talks, webinars by corporates on technical as well as soft skills. We now have on rolls a number of adjunct faculty drawn from industries who will visit the institute and advise students on their career options. We also would send teams to NCR region to have direct one-to-one connect with the industries and persuade them to visit our campus. We will take help of our strong alumni base to bring in more companies to the campus. If needed, we will send our students to NCR region and conduct special campus placement drives there as well. We are also in the process of renovating the career development and guidance centre to give it a corporate look. I believe that all these initiatives will help in attracting good companies and start-ups to the campus. How does the university manage its finances? We were created as a deemed university and the UT supports the institute by allocating funds for establishment as well as for capital works and laboratory development annually. We top up this with the fee collected from the students. We are also generating revenues from sponsored research and consultancy projects. Of late, alumni have also started supporting us by creating a corpus in the institute. Having said so, it is heartening to note that UT Administration, besides their usual grant-in-aid, has promised us Rs 8 crore as additional grant during this financial year for laboratory development and will be carrying out complete campus renovation at a cost of Rs 10 crore from their own resources. As we shall be celebrating 100 years of our existence in 2021, the UT Administration is likely to support the institute in a big way for infrastructure development. Does the university plan to revert to its old name Punjab Engineering College? As of now, the institute does not have any plan to change the name. Our BoG has asked the institute to pursue the matter rigorously with MHRD to allow us to retain the name PEC University of Technology, which in fact, now has become a brand in itself. PEC University of Technology has dropped from rank 38 to 85 in the latest National Institute of Ranking Framework (NIFR). What has led to this downfall? There could be several reasons. NIRF itself is evolving. There could be missing and incomplete data; change in the method of evaluation of various parameters over last year and several others. We are still analysing this and would be able to provide proper response based on facts and figures in a couple of weeks. What initiatives and research projects would be taken under the Kalpana Chawla Chair? The Kalpana Chawla Chair of Geospatial Technology has been established by the Indian Railways with an endowment of Rs 10 crore. The income from this endowment will be used to establish a centre of excellence in geospatial technology, which has a key role to play in all kinds of infrastructure development projects in the country such as smart cities, rail networks, road transports, intelligent transport systems, smart grids, waterways, interlinking of rivers, disaster management and many more. The dreams of GOI schemes of Bharat Mala, Sagar Mala and bullet trains can be fulfilled by appropriately utilising geospatial technologies; be it GIS, GPS, electronic surveying, satellite data processing, LIDAR data processing, drone or UAV-based photography. The chair will, however, focus on projects conceived by Indian Railways on rail route alignments, property surveys, 3D modelling and visualisation of rail route alignments, GIS-based rail traffic management and monitoring systems, accident mapping, EIA studies for rail networks etc. What are future plans? Will there be addition of seats in any courses? We have recently increased our UG intake and there are no further plans for increasing the seats. We first need to create proper infrastructure for this increased intake. We also need to hire more faculty members in keeping with the increase in intake. We have plans to start one or two executive PG programmes for working professionals in some key thematic areas on the lines of IIMs. We have set our future goals for next three years. For all the latest India News, download Indian Express App now

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