Albert Einstein once famously said,
“Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results”.
After years of ignorance and negligence, the current administration of BIT, paying heed to that has ushered the way, introducing changes and continuously reviewing, updating and developing its lab facilities. The genesis of all the renovation works have already been catching eyes.
Renovation
The recent renovation of Department buildings and students’ hostels is already underway and by the beginning of this even semester BIT would be a sight to see.
Hostel after renovation
Laboratories
Laboratory experience, an indispensable part of the educational process is a key factor in preparing students for real life engineering environment; for this reason, the college has joined hands with tech giants Siemens, Oracle and Cisco to develop 17 laboratories to train their students to cater to today’s industrial needs.
Our institution is undergoing a huge tech overhaul.
- Fifteen laboratories are to be developed with the aid of Siemens, an industrial engineering firm for different engineering departments including Mechanical, Electrical, Electronics and Communication and Production engineering.
- Two more labs – one for IT department and another for Computer science engineering will be set up in collaboration with computer technology giants Oracle and Cisco respectively.
Construction of all 17 laboratories began in June, of which two are already operational. The rest are expected to be completed by July-end.
Other than this, a three – storey IT building spread over 9,000 square feet is expected to come up by November, as the Director reported the ground floor would be ready by July.
Professional personnel are required to be available to provide necessary help and support to students in projects and experiments. In order to meet this demand, thirty-five laboratory staffs, 25 from Siemens and 10 from the college itself are being trained.
Talking to one of the leading daily the Director D.K. Singh said, “The labs are being set up in accordance with the directive of the state higher and technical education department secretary Ajay Kumar Singh to develop the infrastructure of the institute according to the latest technological requirement.”
The Higher Technical Education department of Jharkhand has signed a MoU with Siemens for setting up the labs in BIT Sindri and the government polytechnic institute run by the state government.
“The labs will give an edge to the institute and help to groom its students according to the needs of this fast changing industry”, the proactive Director added.
Moreover the institute would soon be setting up an incubation centre to promulgate start-up ventures by students.
Programming is just an appendage—the soul of a project is the “IDEA”. No matter how beautiful your user interface is, it’s useless if you cannot envisage. It’s just a vase without flowers and so, to give students ample opportunities and a platform to create something out of thin air, BIT Sindri in its campus, is also setting up an Internet of Things lab with the help of Dubai Chapter of BIT Sindri Alumni Association, which will be operational from July.
It is expected in future that the lab would grow from a technology sandbox to a growing community of students, faculty and industry-leading personnel. Hopefully, the lone state-run government college shall soon start blossoming and the banal course of studies shall be provided with some venture for students to elicit the best out of them.
These developments will hopefully bring a full stop to the long standing demands of improvement in infrastructure by students and the faculty of BIT.
Dr. D. K. Singh, Director, BIT Sindri
Autonomous Status
However the demand for Autonomous Status has not been forgotten amidst this surge of infrastructure development.
Evidently since its foundation BIT has been struggling to achieve autonomy but has failed repeatedly due to one or the other reason. In 2015, under the then Director U. K. Dey the current Chief Minister Raghubar Das had decided to grant autonomous status to BIT Sindri but the problem of scarcity of faculty has stopped the implementation of this decision.
There are just around 79 teachers on roll against the sanctioned strength of 256. Nearly 90% technical support staff if the institute laboratories are lying vacant for quite a time. With the introduction of new laboratories these numbers have gone up.
Recently many advertisements for various posts have appeared in the print media but the question is how much time it will take to complete the recruitment process. The last time teachers were appointed for the institute, it took nearly seven years from advertisement to finalising appointment process.
With the recent improvements it would not be a good idea to overlook the developments to highlight the shortcomings of the administration, as this is the first time in years when BIT has seen such a change in its infrastructure, it is truly a Tectonic Shift from the earlier conditions, but we still have a long way to go and hopefully with the current Director spearheading the waves of change we will soon see the re-emergence of the Glory days of BIT.
Meanwhile the students are eagerly waiting for the vacations to end in anticipation to see the changes in the campus first hand.
What are your views on the recent strides of change in BIT, let us know in the Comments.
SARJANA 