Tuesday, April 27, 2010

At IISc, it's raining campuses


During the Centenary year, our Institute got a huge piece of land -- nearly 2000 acres, or about five times the size of its main campus -- at Kundapur in Chitradurga district, about 200 km from Bengaluru. Sometime ago, Divya Gandhi had a story on IISc's plans for constructing a synchrotron there.

And now, a letter from HRD Minister Kapil Sibal reveals an Andhra Pradesh government plan offering IISc a thousand acres in Anantapur district, about 100 km. from the main campus.

“Since there was an enthusiastic request from the governments, a team from IISc visited two sites in Anantpur. That does not mean we are going to set up a campus anytime soon. We took 100 years to build IISc to what it is today. Expansion is no child’s play,” said a top scientist.

The AP offer and the HRD Minister's support for it are very interesting, especially since the previous avatar of the UPA government frowned upon similar offers to the IITs -- for IIT-M's Kerala campus and IIT-B's Gujarat campus, for example.

3 Comments:

  1. Raj said...

    Swami Abinanda, maybe you can use the land to start an Indian Institute of Tantric Sciences.

  2. Anonymous said...

    Abi,

    If this news about the synchrotron is true, then it would be a wonderful piece of news. Indus II being 'built' in Indore is an international joke, considering the amount of time it has taken. The prospect of one being able to do decent experiments anytime in the near future there is extremely remote. Hopefully, IISc, in collaboration with other institutions can end up doing a far better job.

  3. Ludwig said...

    I think IISc. should accept the AP offer and build some sort of circular collider underground, but a small section of it should be inside Karnataka, in honour of certain other border-crossing colliders.

    The AP section will be called Pedda Hadronu Collideru (and will result in several villagers landing up because they think it's a Primary Healthcare Centre) and in Karnataka it will be called the Dodda Hadronu Collideru.

    And in the glorious tradition of almost every single fort in India, one of the tunnels should be designed such that "...it leads directly to the diwaan-e-aam in Fatehpur Sikri...".