IIT Alumni Council sets up excellence centre in Ropar, targets 50k crore annual revenue with 100,000 researchers in 5 years  

The IIT Alumni Council is setting up a Global Centre of Excellence (GCE) in IIT Ropar on Wednesday to develop India as a leading location for high science research by creating an end-to-end ecosystem with a revenue target of Rs 50,000 crores per annum and 100,000 researchers within five years. The core areas of focus will be Agritech and water under this centre with multi-disciplinary support from areas like artificial imaging, computer vision, IoT sensors, chemical engineering, nuclear physics and more.

Explaining further, Ravi Sharma, President of the IIT Alumni Council said, "The Agritech and water ecosystem being co-created along with existing research and academic institutions will lay the foundation for Agriculture 2.0. In addition to revitalising the agriculture economy, the research initiative will also help create a contract and funded research ecosystem capable of earning substantial foreign exchange."

Speaking about this partnership, Professor Sarit K Das, Director, IIT Ropar said, "The entry of India into the global research marketplace is long overdue. IITs, with their rich legacy and global branding, are rightly placed to address this opportunity. Punjab is the best known for Agriculture and natural irrigation. If agricultural excellence were to be given a GI, then it would go to Punjab. We are looking forward to leading globally in research for Agritech and Water. By optimally exploiting the new paradigms emerging from the deployment of artificial intelligence, remote sensing and genomics, we are uniquely positioned to blend tradition with technology in a very different way than has been attempted thus far by traditional agricultural institutions – and this approach should lead us to new frontiers and achievements."

The GCE is an extension of the overall vision of the India Innovation Network initiative which is building a fifty-institution ecosystem to revitalise research in India. This is being done by building capacities, improving quality of researchers through better linkages globally and enhancing the brand value of India in general and the IITs and i2Net institutions in particular. This will help India garner a higher share of the Rs 500,000 crore market for funded research and sponsored PhDs.

The IIT Alumni Council is the largest global body of alumni, students and academicians across all the twenty-three IITs and partnering Institutes of the India Innovation Network (I2Net). Through such initiatives, IIT Alumni Council intends to act as a network and as a bridge between various providers of knowledge, wealth, information, wisdom, ideas, expertise and entrepreneurship to promote appropriate technological solutions to known social challenges at the national level.