A university to manage a rapidly urbanising India

Bangalore - With over 625,000 villages, rural India still dominates the country's landscape even as rapid urbanising is throwing up  challenges for planners. To train people manage this massive social   transformation and fill the critical human resource and knowledge gap, a group of eminent Indians is setting up a university.

One of them, Nandan Nilekani, a co-founder of India's IT bellwether Infosys  who now spearheads the massive exercise of providing billion Indians a  unique identification number, and his wife Rohini, have just gifted Rs. 50  crore to the proposed varsity.

Called the Indian Institute of Human Settlement, the institute is coming up  near Bangalore and the people behind it are in talks with the government for  recognition of its courses.

Besides Nilekani, other leading figures forming the board of directors of  the venture are renowned industrialists and academicians like Xerxes Desai,  Jamshyd Godrej, Cyrus Guzder, Renana Jhabvala, Vijay Kelkar, Keshub   Mahindra, Kishore Mariwala, Rahul Mehrotra, Rakesh Mohan, Nasser Munjee, Deepak Parekh, Shirish Patel, Aromar Revi and Deepak Satwalekar.

The IIHS will offer "globally benchmarked bachelors, masters and doctoral  degrees in urban practice based on a wide set of disciplines and practice  areas central to India's urban transformation," Aromar Revi, its director,  told IANS in an interview.

The Bachelors in Urban Practice (BUP) programme "will be a four-year course,  after the plus-2 level of schooling. The MUP programme will be a two year  course," said Revi, an alumnus of IIT-Delhi and the law and management schools of Delhi University.

The IIHS will begin by offering the masters programme first from July next  year, provided the government gives regulatory clearances by that time, he said.

"Discussions are active with the government on getting the appropriate  regulatory clearances," Revi said.

The "tentative fee structure for the MUP is in the range of Rs.300,000 and  Rs.400,000 per annum," he said. The IIHS "is planning to offer up to 50  percent of its students' scholarships and financial assistance of varying  degrees depending on need," he added.

Revi was confident that students passing out of this institute will have job  opportunities since the "most serious constraint facing Indian cities today  is not capital but the availability of suitably educated professionals, entrepreneurs and change makers who can act in the common good".

"We anticipate career opportunities across the public and private sectors as  well as civil society and universities and knowledge enterprises. There is a  large gap in the supply of urban practitioners and inter-disciplinary  professionals as India and its urban areas grow," he said.

On the gift by the Nilekanis, he said "this is in keeping with their vision  of building quality transformative institutions for India and a  reinforcement of their past philanthropic commitments. Nandan Nilekani has  been deeply involved with the IIHS from its conceptualisation".

Announcing the gift Tuesday, the Nilekanis said: "IIHS is at the convergence  of both our interests in education, urbanisation and sustainability."

The IIHS is coming up on a 54-acre site in Kengeri, on the Bangalore  outskirts. "Work on planning the first phase of the 42,000-sq metre campus  has started. It will be executed in a phased manner over the next five to  seven years," Revi told IANS.

On what prompted the setting up of this institute, he said there was a need  o fill "a critical human resource and knowledge gap in addressing multiple challenges of urbanisation".

"The IIHS is conceived as an inter-disciplinary university born out of the  realisation that a single academic programme within a university would not  be able to offer the breadth and depth of inter-disciplinary academics and practice that are urgently required to solve the multiple dimensions of urbanisation challenges that the country is confronted with," he said.

The IIHS has tie-ups with several well-known institutions, including the  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University College London  (UCL), and The African Centre for Cities (ACC) of the University of CapeTown (UCT), Revi said.