We have 450 BTech seats, want to take this to 1000: IIT Hyderabad Director

IIT Hyderabad Director Prof BS Murthy believes that Atmanirbhar Bharat can only be a reality if there is a strong industry-academia collaboration. Keeping this in mind, he launched several industry-oriented initiatives in the last one year, the recent being three BTech courses in Computational Engineering, Bioinformatics and Industrial Chemistry. 

In a candid interview with Shiksha, Prof BS Murthy speaks on a range of issues. Below are the excerpts from the interview.

Q. In 2019, IIT Hyderabad became the first institute in the country to offer full-fledged BTech in artificial intelligence. What all career opportunities are there for students?

A. We want to prepare our human resources for futuristic growth. We have a masters programme and a PhD programme in artificial intelligence (AI). We have almost 25 faculty members who are working in AI. The first BTech batch is in the third year now and they will be passing out in 2023. We currently have 450 UG intake and this year, we have proposed 470 seats and we want to take this to 1,000 in 4-5 years. We have also set up an AI lab for which Honeywell Technology Solutions has given money. We also have support from Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). We have also set up High-Performance Computing Centre (HPC), which was inaugurated in August this year and it will be ready by the end of this month. We will open it not only for ourselves but also for outside people.

Q. IIT Hyderabad retained eighth position in engineering category as per NIRF rankings 2021.What factors contributed to the achievement?

A. Possibly, we were the first among all engineering institutions in India to start fractal academics. These are small courses which have introduction to something. You can have one-week programme under which you can get credits. Once the student gets interested, he can go deeper and take up courses that are of higher credits. We introduce our students to a variety of possibilities of engineering in the beginning so that they can have a flexibility. This way, we are enabling interdisciplinary learning with a wide choice of basic courses and advanced electives. 

In addition to that, research is our main focus. We have 6,000 papers published and 1,400 projects going on. Our start-up culture is very strong. We also have a department of entrepreneurship under which we offer a minor in entrepreneurship. This year, we started a dual degree (BTech-MTech) programme and we call it techno-entrepreneurship.

Q. IIT Hyderabad recently inaugurated India’s first building made of bio-bricks from agricultural waste. What will the commercial viability of this project? Were students also part of it?

A. At IITH, we started a programme called BUILD (Bold and Unique Ideas Leading to Development) under which we encourage our BTech, MTech and PhD students to come up with innovative ideas. We select 10-15 such ideas every year and support them with whatever money they want. Typically, we give them up to INR 1 lakh. This is one of such projects which has been developed by one of our PhD students from the Design Department.  

Paddy waste is generally burnt off which creates a lot of pollution. So, we thought this was one way to stop pollution and in the process we are converting wealth from waste. Bio-bricks manufacture can help farmers generate income and create new employment opportunities for them during off-season. So, in a way we are solving three problems – curbing pollution, generating wealth from waste and creating job opportunities. We have also adopted five villages within 10-km radius of IIT Hyderabad under the Central government’s flagship programme, Unnat Bharat Abhiyan (UBA). Under this, whatever technologies we develop at the institute can be used in rural areas for development and livelihood generation, for example, ground water purification, building hygienic toilets. So, we selected five such projects and gave INR 10 lakh each.

This one-year bio-brick project is almost over and by March 2022, we are expecting this technology to be implemented in villages. Our teams are visiting villages and educating farmers to implement it. We have also bought some chopping machines which we are trying to install in villages so that they can start doing it and it becomes a source of earning for them. The aim is to generate employment within the village.

Q. What steps have you taken towards strengthening industry-academia collaborations?

A. We strongly believe that IITs have to work very closely with industries. If you want Atmanirbhar Bharat to be a reality, industry-academia collaboration is something which is very important. In the last one year, we have introduced a number of initiatives. One such initiative is semester-long internship. Most of the IITs have 2-3 months summer internships. We thought that in two months, nobody can learn much, so we revamped our curriculum in such a way that the sixth semester is completely free for the students. There are no core courses in that semester, only elective courses are there. Students go for semester internship from January to July and they get six credits for that.

Q. Several posts of faculty are lying vacant in IITs. Is the institute facing any such issue. Is yes, how do you plan to address this problem of staff shortage?

A. Currently, we have 245 faculty members and in the last two months, we have recruited about 25-30 faculty. I expect that by December-end, we will have about 260-270 faculty for about 3,000 students. So, looking at the student-faculty ratio, we are close to about 12:1. We have the highest number of faculty out of all second-generation IITs. We are looking forward to having 400 faculty for 5,000 students by 2025. Also, we recruit faculty in every six months. This month only, we brought out a special advertisement for reserved categories and we expect to get applications by the end of this month and in the next two months, we will select and conduct interviews in this particular area too. We have started using IITH as a different acronym now “Inventing & Innovating in Technology for Humanity”.

Q. Are you devising strategies to usher in blended learning?

A. I believe that engineering has to be an offline education as there is a lot of hands-on learning. Management and computer science can be online, but in mechanical, chemical, civil and clinical engineering, people have to have hands-on experience and that can only happen when students are there on the campus. We are planning to bring all fully vaccinated students back to the campus by January 2022 and start in an offline mode.

Q. Are you giving any fee concession to students who have lost one or both their parents to COVID-19?

A. Whenever there is a request, we give fee concessions. We do it on and off regularly, but that is not as a one-time measure as we also have students who come from poor backgrounds. So, we keep supporting them. We recently started a student welfare fund to help such students. Also, we have started giving students interest-free loans for the purchase of laptops.

Q. Will there be any fee increase in courses offered by IIT Hyderabad? What is the fee structure of MTech courses?

A. BTech fee is common for all IITs so we do not touch that at all. But expenses keep on increasing every year so we increased other fees, for instance, hostel fee by 5-10 per cent and MTech and PhD fee also by about 5-10 per cent.

Also, government funding to IITs has come down significantly, so we are trying to raise funds by a small increase in fee. Our MTech fee per semester is INR 4,000-5,000. So, when you complete MTech, the complete fee comes to be around INR 20,000. 

Q. IIT Hyderabad recently launched online MTechprogrammes and an online MDes programme for working professionals. What was the idea behind launching these programmes?

A. We have started seven online new MTech programmes in Industrial Metallurgy, EV Technology, Computational Mechanics, Integrated Computational Materials Engineering, Communication and Signals Processing, Power Electronics and Power System, Microelectronics and VLSI and an online MDes programme. All these programmes are being taught in evening hours. We received good number of applications for all these programmes. In fact, for the MDes programme, we received around 500 applications, but we selected about 25-30 people, whereas 90 people had applied for Industrial Metallurgy programme, but we selected only 25 people. As these programmes are mainly for industry people, so their tution fee is higher than regular master’s fee. This is also helping us to raise some funding.

Q. Are there any newprogrammes that will be started at IIT Hyderabad?

A. Yes, we just started three newindustry-oriented BTech programmes in Computational Engineering, Bioinformatics and Industrial Chemistry. BTech in Computational Engineering will be totally different from Computer Science Engineering. This is basically to prepare our engineers for various manufacturing industries. Bioinformatics is an area which is going to come up in a big way.

BTech in Industrial Chemistry is different from typical MSc in Chemistry. All industries, be it petrochemical industry, polymer industry or pharmaceutical industry, need chemists from engineering background. So we want to teach students the engineering parts of chemistry so that they become ready for these kinds of industries. Admission to all these courses will be through JEE Advanced and the initial intake of these courses will be 10 seats each. We will increase seats depending upon the interest of students. Fee structure will be same like any other BTech programme. 

Read more: 

• IIT Hyderabad announces fellowship in technology for foreign research scholars
• IIT Hyderabad scholars construct India’s first bio-bricks building from agricultural waste 
• IIT Hyderabad gets artificial intelligence lab