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The Mahindra Group has marked its entry into the technical education space by setting up an engineering institution in Hyderabad.
Mahindra École Centrale has been set up in collaboration with the France-based École Centrale and Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University-Hyderabad.
According to Tech Mahindra executive vice chairman Vineet Nayyar, the institute would facilitate extensive industry-university collaboration to generate global soft-skilled tech managers, which for India is quite important to maintain global edge.
The institute also aims to bring the upfront industry managerial practices close to practising engineering graduates.
The campus would start absorbing students from the academic year 2014 with an intake of 300 for the initial batch and in the years would raise this to 2,500. To start with, it would consider the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-JEE) score for admissions. The campus is affiliated to JNTU-Hyderabad.
Nayyar on Friday said India despite having numerous engineering institutes fared badly in terms of qualitative considerations. The group plans to establish full-fledged technical education campuses and satellite centres in cities including Chennai, Goa, Pune and Jaipur as it sees rapid transformation in Indian education sector.
Speaking on the current state of technical education in the country, JNTU vice chancellor Rameshwar Rao said commercialisation of technology was low at the university level and India should encourage ‘mission critical research’ approach to facilitate knowledge sharing between the industry and varsities.
