Sankar Kumar Som (left), who was officiating as director of IIT Kharagpur till Pratha Pratim Chakrabarti (right) took over on Saturday. Picture by Bishwarup Dutta

A priority of the new director of IIT Kharagpur is to develop a strategic road map for the institute for the next five years.

“We cannot make a step jump. We will work collectively towards drawing up a strategic road map for the institute for the next five years,” said Partha Pratim Chakrabarti, who took over as director of the IIT on Saturday.

Chakrabarti, a professor of the computer science and engineering department of the institute, was speaking to reporters after the 59th annual convocation on Saturday.

Research will continue to be a primary point of focus for the institute as it works towards Vision 20:20, that aims to establish IIT Kharagpur as one of the top 20 research and innovation-based institutes of the world by 2020.

“At present, 10 per cent of the students at IIT Kharagpur are PhD scholars. We aim to increase this to 20 per cent in the next five years and finally scale it up to 30 per cent,” said Chakrabarti.

The institute is also looking at introducing international summer semester programmes in collaboration with various foreign universities. These courses will be part of the curriculum for the IIT Kharagpur students but will also be open to industry and students of other institutes who will pay for them.

The institute’s undergraduate programmes, too, may be tweaked a bit. “A lot of our students do a lot of extra-curricular work, such as building aeroplane models, robots and cars. We are thinking of giving credits for such initiatives as it will make academia much more interesting than classroom teaching,” said a senior professor of the institute.

Recruiting “young and bright” faculty is another focus area of the institute, which has already offered faculty positions to 70 candidates at the entry level.

“We have 10,000 students. Going by the desired student-teacher ratio of 10:1, we need 1,000 teachers. At present we have 560 teachers,” said professor Sankar Kumar Som, who was officiating as director of the institute before Chakrabarti took over.

Incentives like an increase in research grants are being considered to attract bright, young minds to the institute.

Chakrabarti also talked about the IIT’s plan to start medical education by 2016. As part of the plan, the institute will set up a 400-bedded super-specialty hospital, work on which is likely to start by October.

“We will draw up the curriculum on the lines of the Medical Council of India’s guidelines. That may not require amendment of the IIT act, which will take a lot of time,” said Som.