siliconindia | | September 20178ACADEMIES & CORPORATES BRIDGING THE GAP & BRINGING MORE RELEVANCE TO THE SYLLABUSBy Prof. S.K. Das, Director, IIT RoparIndian Institute of Technology, Ropar is one of the eight new IITs set up by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Government of India, to expand the reach and enhance the quality of technical education in the country.A lot is talked about Industry-Academia interaction in In-dia. Hundreds of seminars/conferences have been held on this without much significant change on the ground. I think there are few key elements in this. First is the need, once the industry is convinced about the capa-bility of academia to develop product and technologies and are in need of developing technology, they will come to academia. It cannot be by good wishes. It should be need based and expertise based interaction. On the other hand, an academic entity will also be interested in industrial problems if the goals of the entity are defined keeping industry in mind. The first part of the story that is the need of the industry was opened up by Liberalization of Indian Economy which sent a clear signal that without im-proving technology, Indian industry can-not survive. We all remember how in 70s and 80s Bajaj scooter or Ambassador car was difficult to purchase even after pay-ing money, where not even a screw was changed from one model to another. The same company today brings out new mod-els and designs every year providing own finance to the consumers to buy.This has on one hand induced them to spend on their in-house R&D, on the other hand look outward for solutions. The first wave of looking outward was through buying foreign technology and collabo-rations. However, with the foreign com-panies themselves coming in the Indian market, it became increasingly difficult; also it became increasingly difficult for the medium and small industry to survive because they didn't have in-house R&D at all. This brought out two trends; one is to run to consulting companies and the other to academia. Quickly, these companies re-alized that consulting companies offer only existing solutions but not innovations. This has brought out the next stage of develop-ment, which is that of startups, acquisitions and solutions from academia and research IN MY OPINION
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