The third campus of Rabindra Bharati University (RBU) will come up in Salt Lake.

Construction of the seven-storeyed building on 14 cottahs in EE block will begin in March, vice-chancellor Bharati Mukherjee said on Friday.

The university was born in 1962 at the Jorasanko home of Rabindranath Tagore. In 1972, it opened its second campus on BT Road. After 33 years, the third campus is set to come up in Salt Lake.

Vice-chancellor Mukherjee said the construction cost of the third campus has been estimated at Rs 3 crore. ?We want to complete the construction of the base before the next monsoon. The foundation stone of the building will be laid in March, after which we will start construction work,? Mukherjee said.

The ground and first floors of the new building will house the university?s offices. ?There will be an international guest house on the second, third and fourth floors where scholars from abroad can put up. The rest of the floors will be used for academic activities and running distance education centres under the university,? the vice-chancellor elaborated.

University registrar Santosh Kumar Ghorai said the need for the third campus was keenly felt by students, teachers and scholars of the university as there was an acute space crunch in the two existing campuses.

?We have 7,000 regular students and 20,000 students in different courses on distance education and private courses. It is difficult to accommodate 160 full-time and 250 part-time teachers there. So, we can shift all our offices to Salt Lake. The other two campuses will conduct academic activities only,? the registrar explained.

The arts faculty of Rabindra Bharati will be shifted to Sangeet Bhavan, under construction on the BT Road campus.

?We plan to maintain the Tagore museum only on our Jorasanko campus, and all the departments will be shifted to BT Road,? the registrar signed off.