Bangalore: As India is facing a shortage of engineering teachers, to tackle this problem, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B) is planning to initiate various programs.

As a part of this move, aimed at introducing its high quality course and innovative teaching skills to the faculty staff in engineering colleges around the country, IIT-B has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Wipro, one of major IT companies in India which has initiated Mission 10x, a program to nurture talent pool across the engineering faculty in the country.

In India, there is a requirement of about 1.6 lakh teachers for 20 lakh engineering students and only 4,000 engineering teachers get trained every year.

Professor K Moudgalya, Head, Centre for Distance Engineering Education Program (CDEEP), IIT-B, said that distance education was a partial way to addressing this issue and the same was finding gradual acceptance among institutions and industry alike.

Wipro's initiative, Mission 10x, will now work with IIT-B to jointly organize various programs for improving engineering courses in the country.

According to the MoU, Mission 10x will be involved in creating teaching methodology and IIT-B will deal with the content delivery for three years. The initiative aims to cover 10,000 faculties by 2010.

IIT-B's Centre for Distance Engineering Education Program (CDEEP) has been conducting live transmission of its engineering courses in India and abroad through various technologies including EDUSAT that enables web-based interaction between its participants and IIT-B faculty.

Moreover, CDEEP has also coordinated with IIT-B's course creation efforts for the National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) which has also been made available on the popular video sharing website YouTube. By using EDUSAT, CDEEP has been transmitting IIT-B's courses to more than 50 engineering colleges in India free of cost.

The new joint venture is supposed to create educational materials and meant to establish a joint center of excellence to carry out joint research activity in the field of education and transmission of educational material through EDUSAT.

Selvan D, Senior Vice-President for talent transformation at Wipro Technologies said, "The idea is to utilize the IIT's expertise in distance learning for pushing a faculty-to-faculty leverage training model being introduced from the second year of Mission 10X, beginning on September5."