The International Institute of Information Technology-Bangalore (IIIT-B) has sought 25 acres to 50 acres of land for expanding its campus. This is to enable it to accommodate up to 3,000 students with the expansion of its present research facility.
“We have intimated our desire to the state government regarding the expansion and the state government has identified some land outside the city,” S Sadagopan, director of IIIT-Bangalore, said on the sidelines of the annual convocation day celebrations here.
Established in 1998 by the government, the institute has a capacity of around 500 students and had been conferred with the deemed university status from 2005.
The institute had received close to Rs 27 crore from both the Centre and state government, and around Rs 70 crore from industry, alumni, among others in the last 10 years.
“We have approached the Centre for Rs 100 crore grant for expanding our operations in future by increasing student capacity and raising faculty numbers from the present 22 to around 50 in future,” he said.
He also said that the institute would like to start undergraduate programme in the next five to seven years for imparting complete IT education to the students.
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IIIT, which runs post graduate programme on its campus as of now, has also seen substantial infrastructure development in recent times.
“We have added around 100 new rooms with the addition of 35,000 sq ft in the last decade,” Sadagopan said.
Talking of placements, he said, “Placement was never an issue as there is almost a 100 per cent placement every year.” He said, the average salary of students this year was above Rs 5 lakh with almost all students being absorbed by various companies.
Despite IT industry witnessing a robust growth, IT firms are facing severe human resource crunch.
As per Nasscom, only 25 per cent of the technical graduates are employable. This will pose a serious challenge to sustaining the future growth in IT space.
Industry experts are of the opinion that there is need for more specialised IT education to fill up the gap.
“Today, by and large, most of the workforce we draw are from non-computing background. For example: Of the 25,000 people employed by Infosys last year, we had only 10 per cent of them with IT back ground. So, it’s time to have IT background people on board,” N R Narayana Murthy, chairman of governing council of IIIT and chief mentor of Infosys said.
He also said that to sustain the growth momentum of Indian economy, engineering graduates with non-IT background should be given a chance to enter into their respective field.
Murthy also emphasised on the need of further investment by government and industry towards IT education.