RESOURCE BASE: A member of the French team addresses students on the exchange programme. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

As part of a nine-day Indo-French academic exchange on energy, transport and environment, representatives from French universities addressed students and teachers in Calcutta on March 21 at Jadavpur University (JU) on the courses they offer.

The Indian institutes present included IIT Kharagpur, IIT Guwahati, Jadavpur University (JU), Heritage Institute of Technology and National Institute of Technology, Durgapur. “Our object is not to take away the intellectual resources here. We want Indian students to go to France and return to work here,” said Olivier Duchatelle, attaché for scientific and university cooperation of the French embassy in India.

The French institutions included Ecole Polytechnique (EP), Institut Superieur de l’ Aeronautique et de l’Espace, Hautes Etudes d’Ingenieur, Ecole Centrale and d’ Electronique Ecole Centrale de Nantes.

The scholarships offered include French government grants by the ministry of foreign affairs, institutional scholarships in the form of tuition waivers and regional grants.

“The most coveted are the corporate scholarships, where institutions tie up with corporate houses for a scholarship and a stint in the company,” explained Nusrat Hossain, education adviser of Campus France, based at Alliance Francaise. There has been a 70 per cent increase in the number of applications for scholarships from the city, she added.

EP is keen on collaborating with JU in fluid and fusion mechanics and with IIT Guwahati in mathematics, physics and computer science at the post graduate level. “EP has shown interest in a dual degree. For a better collaboration, teachers should visit the respective universities to assess the situation,” said Biswajit Ghosh, the director of JU’s School of Energy Studies.

“The interactive sessions with the colleges and the individual counselling was very satisfying. I am considering trying for a master’s degree in communication and computer security at Ecole Ingenieur Telecom ParisTech,” said Rahul Sinha, who passed out from Netaji Subhash Engineering College last year.