Berhampur, Nov. 17: A five-member fact-finding central government team today visited two proposed sites in Ganjam district for setting up a permanent campus of Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research (IISER) Odisha.

One of the sites is near Paluru Hills, which is 15km away from Berhampur railway station. The other site Loudigam is 20km from the railway station. The Ganjam district administration had proposed these two sites.

The team consisted of principal secretary of the state skill development and technical education Laxmi Narayan Gupta, director (management) of human resource development ministry Rina Sanyal Kohli, director of IISER Bhopal Vinod Kumar Singh, director of IIT Bhubaneswar R.V. Raja Kumar and chief engineer of central public works department Ramesh Chandra Mishra. Revenue divisional commissioner, southern division, Sanjay Singh and sub-collector, Berhampur, Nikhil Pavan Kalyan accompanied the team that visited the two sites.

"We have come here to select the land. We saw both the places. We would work out on all the options and take a final decision and inform the authorities," Raja Kumar said.

"Both the sites are suitable. But the land at Paluru Hills is better and it has access to National Highway-5," Raja Kumar said.

Regular classes of IISER Odisha will start from July next year from a temporary campus.

The central team has visited four institutes - Berhampur School of Engineering and Technology, Gandhi Institute of Technology, Roland College Bhaliagada and the government ITI - to take a decision regarding the temporary campus. "We have seen a couple of institutes and IISER Bhopal will take a final decision," Raja Kumar said. IISER Bhopal will be mentoring the proposed institute.

The state government will provide 200 acres of land free of cost to IISER Odisha, which was announced by Union finance minister Arun Jaitley during the 2015-16 Union Budget.

Once commissioned, Odisha will join a select states to have the elite IISERs, a group of premier science education and research institutes. IISERs have already been set up in Bhopal, Kolkata, Mohali, Pune, Thiruvanthapuram and Tirupati. These institutions have been declared by an Act of Parliament as institutions of national importance and are intended to be the IITs for basic sciences. They will carry out research in frontier areas of science and provide science education at the undergraduate and post-graduate levels. The institutes were created by the government of India through the ministry of human resource development, under The National Institutes of Technology (Amendment) Bill, 2010.

The Forum for Ganjam, which is demanding that the institute be set up in Ganjam, welcomed the visit by the central team. Describing it as a positive step, Sudhir Rout, one of the forum's leaders, said: "We are very optimistic and hope that the state government will not deviate from its decision to establish IISER Odisha in Ganjam."