A Vision for Research at IITBBS

Soon after taking over as the director, with the objective of establishing an institute of global excellence, which means setting of new standards, and rising to commensurate standards, consciously the vision of the institute was made more ambitious to "IIT Bhubaneswar will be globally well recognized for creating outstanding graduates and new knowledge" despite the challenges it poses, and the endeavour was continued. Furthermore, in order to help the nation towards realizing its dream of "Self Reliant India", serious actions for shaping of the research activity was done (through academic enhancements to encourage research, product design and development, impetus to entrepreneurship and values).

Global recognition for creating new knowledge essentially calls for rising the standards of the research to commensurate standards. Several actions were successfully taken in this director and fairly good initial success were achieved.

The attributes of the research ecosystem created include essential features such as the following:

• The faculty is the key resource for research and hence ensuring that the faculty recruitment standards are raised despite there is shortage of quality candidates, by being patient in the rise of numbers. This may affect the institutional rank in the ranking systems, but there is no short-cut and this is an essential requirement.
• Giving emphasis to quality than quantity despite that the ranking systems depend significantly on the per-capita quantity.
• For increasing the standards, it is essential and standards of research scholar selections, academic practices and thesis examination were significantly raised.
• The faculty was encouraged to work on cutting edge areas, create research facilities and take up research projects of national importance.
• In order to rise the appropriateness and relevance to society, impetus was given to the faculty to carry on translational research, participation in national endeavours and rising national and local relevance in research,
• It was ensured that research was made boundless and encouragement was also given to fundamental research, apart from the translation and applied research.
• Impetus was given to rise the number of sponsored research scholars, mainly from industry, government agencies and academic institutions. It was decided to gradually rise the intake of PhD without affecting the quality of intake.
• A lot of importance was given to collaborative research involving global and local industry, institutions and other agencies.
• It was envisioned to significantly increase the internationalization of the PhD programme by expanding the intake from neighboring and SAARC countries. It was decided to publicize the PhD programme in neighboring countries and the different schools were advised to publicize their research output across institutions abroad.
• Emphasis was placed on national programmes like Vajra, Gyan and Imprint and the institute got the highest number of sanctions amongst the 2nd generation IIT’s.
• Going by the societal requirement (local, national and global) and studying the strengths of the schools, interests of the faculty, Prof Kumar personally created the thrust areas of research for the institute which may be reviewed time to time, fine-tuned and implemented.
• Building teams like IC design expertise, semiconductor technology, Cyber Forensics & Security; creating research centers like AR-VR, energy, research facilities like Central Research Facility, Clean room and fab facility from scratch were taken up on war footing., some of which are explained in the different subsections, here.