The Darjeeling hills’ first engineering college was opened on Wednesday, 78 years after Independence, which academics said reflected the state of technical education in the region.
The Darjeeling Hill Institute of Technology & Management (DHITM), established by the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration (GTA), was inaugurated at Takdah, about 30km from here. The college will be managed by the Bhubaneswar-based Orissa Child Welfare Education Trust.
The cost of building the infrastructure of the university was borne by the NHPC, which had agreed to pump in ₹40 crore as part of its corporate social responsibility.
Darjeeling Hill Institute of Technology & Management
“This is a historic day for the people of the hills,” GTA chief executive Anit Thapa said while addressing the gathering following the inauguration of the college.
“This is the first public-private-partnership technical college in the state and I would like to thank the team of GTA officials who worked hard to get the project through,” said Thapa.
The institute, which is approved by the All India Council for Technical Education and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology (MAKUT), will offer undergraduate courses in civil, electrical and mechanical engineering, and computer science, apart from artificial intelligence and machine learning.
There will also be an undergraduate course for hotel management.
The maximum number of seats for computer science and hotel management will be 120, while for other courses, it will be 60.
“Thirty-one per cent of the seats will be reserved for the students of the GTA area,” said Thapa.
While the academic fee for a payment seat in an engineering course will be ₹65,000 for a semester, the same will range between ₹11,000 and ₹14,000 for a “reserved seat”.
However, the hostel fee of ₹37,500 per semester will remain the same for all students.
Many academics say the state of technical education in the Darjeeling and the Kalimpong hills is extremely poor. “The hills are famed for their boarding schools across the globe. Many of these schools were established in the later decades of 19th century, but the state of technical education is pathetic in the hills,” said an educationist.
The Darjeeling Hills University was established only in 2018. The hills still do not have medical, dental or law colleges.