Bhubaneswar, March 20: Information technology major Tech Mahindra has set up a centre for innovation on its campus for students of Biju Patnaik University of Technology in a first-of-its-kind step for any corporate entity in the state.
The new facility will select 25 PhD and MTech students from the varsity every year and engage them in solving real-life industry problems in areas, such as digitalisation, Internet and cloud computing.
Tech Mahindra's senior vice-president B.K. Mishra and BPUT vice-chancellor S.S. Patnaik signed a memorandum of understanding on the issue on Friday. Technical education and training minister Sanjay Das Burma inaugurated the centre on the same day.
"Academic institutions and the industry must work together so that we get industry-ready students. This facility will help students to come across real-life industry problems and find solutions to it. Also, for a student, there can be nothing like the experience gained in live projects," Mishra said.
Tech Mahindra executives will guide the students while associate professors from the varsity will act as their co-guides. The varsity will also pay regular stipends to the PHD students who work on the projects.
"We will select the best students from the top 10 colleges under the varsity through various stringent procedures," said Patnaik.
The MTech students will be allowed to work at the lab for six months to one year, while the PhD scholars can use the facility between one and three years.
The varsity currently has 150 constituent colleges with 6,000 MTech students and around 400 PhD scholars. This year, more than 546 new students have applied for their various PhD programmes.
"We will give preference to PhD students followed by MTech and MCA students," said the vice-chancellor. The university has also announced some courses specially designed for Tech Mahindra's employees, such as Corporate MTech. They will arrange classes either online or on weekends so that working executives can upgrade their qualification. "We have also decided to exempt some MTech credit points of the employees for such courses. There are a few more modalities that need to be worked out on and hopefully we will begin the classes in the next four weeks," Patnaik said.
