Golden Jubilee Gala Event in New York City from July 18-20 ... register now.   PanIIT 2008 Alumni Conference in Chennai from Dec 19-21.   Class of 1983 Silver Jubilee Reunion in Dec 2008.   IITBAA Pune Chapter is inviting nominations for Innovations 2009 to be held in Jan 2009.

• Last year after IIT Bombay restricted internet usage in its hostel rooms, it's counterpart in Delhi has now gone ahead and rationed net usage on their campus. Delhi's decision follows the same reasons - students missing out on morning lectures after downloading movies, games and entertainment till the wee hours. Unlike IIT-B and IIT-M, Delhi has placed a limit on the data students can download on their hostel computers. According to student affairs dean Anurag Sharma, it has served two purposes: improved internet speed and restricted students from downloading heavy movie and gaming files.

• CoCubes is an Indian startup founded by two fresh IIT Bombay graduates. CoCubes is attempting to address the large labor market of fresh college graduates. Every year nearly 12 lakh students graduate from Indian undergraduate universities. Most students graduate and then hunt for jobs. The lucky few have formal recruitment events at their college campuses. CoCubes is building an online platform enabling colleges and companies to host the recruitment process online.

• An air of confidence, tinged with nervousness and urgency filled a room of restless youngsters at IT-D, as they awaited their turn to showcase their business plans to a handful of leading venture capital firms such as Sequoia Capital and Helion Ventures Pvt. Ltd.The winning team from IIT Mumbai called Shuddh Technologies, which has water-treatment technology, is clear it meant business. The founders of this start-up are Yash Singh, 20, from Vadodara and Praveen Sarda, 21, from Nagaur in Rajasthan, who graduates next year. Hellointern.com, the third winner from IIT Bombay, runs an internship portal for engineering and management students and already has 60 recruiters such as Qualcomm Inc.

• Search engine marketing (SEM) is pedestrian. But when an Indian company goes a step beyond, it’s worth a mention. Communicate 2 has done just that by launching ‘reputation management’, to net in top companies as its clients in just a couple of years. For Communicate 2, this was not an easy job. They had to hire the expertise of IIT Bombay. "We worked with a professor there to develop this application called Infocomm." The application tracks all the material about an entity online - be it on blogs or news sites or advertisements of competitors, and then collects the material.

• What happens when what is perhaps India's best-known global brand — as represented by the existing seven IITs — goes from producing just a few thousand IITians to many, many more. Is it like a designer label gone pret, accessible to all but special to none? Many academicians and alumni are convinced that is the fate in store if institutes with inadequate infrastructure and lack of quality teachers sprout up across the country. Says Bhamy Shenoy: "Brand IIT will be diluted and individual IITs will end up becoming brands. Today, it doesn't matter whether a student is from IIT Madras or IIT Bombay. But in the future, people would want to know which IIT a student is from."

• Technology (IIT)-Bombay wants to create a national resource centre for solar thermal power generation. “Nearly 50 per cent of households in India do not have electricity. It is estimated that 10,00,000 MW of power will have to be added in the next 10 years. One option worth looking at is solar thermal power,” said Rangan Banerjee, head, Department of Energy Science and Engineering (DESE), IIT-Bombay. IIT-Bombay now proposes to build solar thermal power plants in India in a demonstration-cum-research facility, which would help in developing indigenous capability and serve as a national resource centre and testing facility.

• The IITs could hike their fees soon, Union Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh Monday told parliament. He told the Rajya Sabha that the Standing Committee of IIT Council (SCIC) has recommended increase in its tution fee for graduate and post-graduate courses. However, he did not specify the amount of the fee hike being considered by the SCIC. Singh is chairperson of the IITs Council. The SCIC had proposed a fee hike from Rs.25,000 to Rs.50,000 per year. Despite doubling the fee, the IITs would still spend about Rs.150,000 on every student. According to an IIT Delhi official, the IIT spends almost Rs.200,000 a student every year.

• naukri.com head Sanjeev Bikhchandani (stated) on TV that IIM Ahmedabad had to lower its entrance level cutoff marks by just a couple of percentage points to accommodate SC/ST candidates for its management course. A call to IIT Bombay revealed similar findings, again off the record. IIT Bombay’s dean had made a presentation where he said the SC/ST candidates there hadn’t scored any worse than the general category students. It flies in the face of a recent data-packed study of the impact of affirmative action in India, by Marianne Bertrand, Rema Hanna and Sendhil Mullainatan (http://papers.nber.org/papers/w13926). The trio from the Universities of Chicago, New York and Harvard looked at the scores of those applying for engineering in one Indian state in 1996. The results are amazing ... the average scores are 480 for the upper caste candidates, 419 for the OBCs (13 per cent lower) and a mere 182 for the SC category (62 per cent lower).

• The immediate implementation of the Other Backward Class (OBC) quota is likely to make life difficult for students living in IIT hostels. In order to accommodate an additional number of students, the authorities may have to cram in more students in every room. IIT Bombay, which has 13 hostels on its campus, is already short of space. Currently, students from first and second year BTech are sharing rooms. However, with the increased student intake of nine per cent in the first year of OBC quota implementation, followed by 18 and 27 per cent in consecutive years, authorities said that henceforth they would be left with no option but to increase the number of students living in each hostel.

• The Dilbert cartoon strip features Asok, the Indian Institute of Technology alumnus, on April 21, 22 and 23 ... more.

• Alumni in the news ...

  • The Indian prime minister described the widespread practice of aborting female fetuses as a “national shame ... Sabu George (MSc '80 Chem), another prominent campaigner, welcomed the prime minister’s decision to devote an entire speech to the subject, but agreed that the content was "very disappointing."

  • Applied Materials, Inc. has appointed Dr Madhusudan V. Atre (MSc '78 Phys) as President of Applied Materials India, responsible for strategy and operations throughout India.

  • A group of students at the XLRI School of Business and Human Resources is coming up with a state-of-the-art design centre here to train tribal artisans in making saleable products. "While developing the portal, we realised there was a huge disconnect between what the market wants and what tribal handicraft artists were making," said Kaushal Chandok, an IIT Bombay alumnus.

  • Kota coaching classes to get into IIT coaching classes ... students who crack the JEE and make it big in the private sector touch the feet of their tutors in coaching classes. When Devendra Kumar Agrawal, an alumnus of IIT Bombay, got his first job at Texas Instruments, Bangalore, he bought Rao, his tutor in Kota, an expensive suit from his first salary.

  • OnMobile Global Ltd, the first Indian company in the mobile value-added services (VAS) space to go public, made its debut on the Bombay Stock Exchange. Promoters of the holding company include founders Arvind Rao (BTech '80 ChE) and other investors.

• Chairman of IIT JEE 2008, Prof N M Bhandari, admitted that the subject-wise cut-offs for reserved candidates may turn out to be less than one mark which was the level to which the bar was lowered last year in one of the subjects for general candidates. The ridiculous cut-offs are thanks to a rather liberal ranking procedure adopted last year by the IIT system, stung as it was by an RTI application seeking statistical basis for the cut-off marks of the 2006 examination.

• A call to IIT Bombay off the record ... IIT Bombay’s Dean had made a presentation where he said the SC/ST candidates there hadn’t scored any worse than the general category students ... it flies in the face of a recent data-packed study of the impact of affirmative action in India by Marianne Bertrand, Rema Hanna and Sendhil Mullainatan. The average scores are 480 for the upper caste candidates, 419 for the OBCs (13 per cent lower) and a mere 182 for the SC category (62 per cent lower). If the creamy layer is to be excluded from reservations, chances are there won’t be enough OBCs to benefit from reservations, especially since the Court has said the qualifying marks for admission cannot be lowered by more than 10 per cent.

• The Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B), is partnering with University of Cambridge for research and exchange of students in nanoscience and nanotechnology. The research activities will be funded through Cambridge Commonwealth Trust that will make an initial investment of Euro 800,000 over a period of five years. 30 students from IIT-B will go to Cambridge over the next three years.

• The three-year-long 27% OBC quota rollout which will also see an increase of 54% in seats for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes has put the IITs, which are already relaxing entry scores drastically to fill these seats, in a fix. The IITs which have already been lowering admission levels for SCs and STs, now feel that with seats for these categories going up, a larger population of students will have to taken in — probably at rock-bottom scores. IIT Bombay director Ashok Misra, who had also pointed this issue out to the Veerappa Moily Oversight Committee, feels that the issue has been completely overlooked. "To take in so many reserved category students, admission criteria will have to be relaxed," he said.

• The sylvan campus in Mumbai's Powai too is slowly peeling off its green cover to meet the demands of expansion. IIT-Bombay chopped down some of its oldest trees recently to construct the new girls' hostel. Permission to pull down more trees has been sought so that a new boys' hostel can be set up. Currently, there are 5,270 students accommodated in 4,200 rooms. Many second-year students share rooms. IIT-B director Ashok Misra said that implementing the 27% OBC quota for undergraduates will put pressure on all fronts — from building larger classrooms to investing more in laboratories, every facility will need expansion.

• "Never happy unless I am pursuing five different interests at the same time." This tagline that welcomes you on his personal blog sums up the character of Ganesh Natarajan (PhD '05 Mgmt), CEO of Zensar Technologies, who took over as Chairman of National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) for 2008-09 on April 7, 2008. Apart from handling these twin responsibilities, Ganesh also chairs the Outsourcing Forum of the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) in Western India and is part of the CII Western Region Council. He is also an avid writer, traveller, cricket enthusiast and doting father. An alumnus of IIT Bombay and Harvard Business School, Ganesh has been at the helm of Pune-based Zensar Technologies, a BPO firm, for over seven years now and has turned it into one of Fortune's Top 10 global offshore outsourcing companies from India.

• Times of India Editorial ... The directors of some Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) feel that giving the same name to new institutes proposed by the government would dilute the brand image of the existing institutions. They are said to have written to the government to consider giving a different name to the new institutes being set up ... this increased production in no way weakens a brand. It only enhances it. Even in case of the seven IITs we are so proud about, lack of high grade research and development prevents them from making the list of top research institutes in the world. We must not give up the attempt to build more and better IITs.

• Half a century after being kickstarted with foreign assistance, the IITs are now handholding other developing nations in establishing engineering institutes. India’s proudest symbols of excellence in technical education are flooded with requests from countries that want to emulate the IIT model. IIT Bombay has signed an agreement with the Nelson Mandela Foundation to help create "the best technical education institute Africa has ever seen", with five campuses spread across the vast continent. "We, the IITs, were handheld and assisted by other countries in our initial days. Now, it is time we helped out countries in need," Professor Pradipta Banerjee, IIT Bombay’s dean, international relations, told The Telegraph. The joint venture, to be called the Africa Institute of Technology, will have its first campus in Nigeria, IIT Bombay officials said.

• 3.2 lakh students would appear in the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) on April 13 for admission into IITs across the country, registering an increase of about 70,000 candidates over last year. There are nearly 4000 seats in these elite institutions. Studying in the IITs could be costlier this year with the elite institutions proposing to hike the fees. The students in all the seven IITs are now paying about Rs 25,000 per annum as fees. It could be increased up to Rs 50,000, he said. "We have proposed a fee hike. But the final decision will be taken by the government," Prasad said.

• The proposed fee hike to Rs.50,000 by the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) is unlikely to be rolled back. According to officials of the human resource development ministry, the hike was inevitable as these institutions spend almost Rs.200,000 on a student every year. IIT Bombay had said that it did not have enough money to pay salaries to its staff.

• It is the turn of students of IIT Powai to unveil a home-grown racing car. The car will be participating in the esteemed Formula SAE in Michigan, USA in May this year. The competition will see 120 teams from across the world, making it one of the biggest international engineering design and manufacturing events. The Formula SAE is a prestigious event for engineering and design competition at university level and breeding ground for future car engineers and designers. "The USP of the car is that it is made in India. It is our dream to make a completely Indian car for Formula One in the next ten years," said Shyam Jade, student, IIT Mumbai. The car was unveiled by India's only Formula One car racer Narain Karthikeyan amid fanfare at the IIT campus in Mumbai on Friday night.

• Exactly one year ago, officials at the elite IIT Bombay began restricting the Internet in hostels after fearing high-speed access was impeding socialization, replacing talk with instant messaging, virtual gaming instead of the sweaty, heart-rate-quickening variety. Initially, the "LAN ban", as it was dubbed, was between 4.30pm and 7pm, and then midnight and 7am. The action was greeted with protest and much fear about just how a generation that largely grew up on the Internet would manage. A year later, a funny thing has happened: it’s working.

• Google's nationwide contest among computer science students to select 'product prodigies' drew entries from nearly 100 teams. The top prize went to the team from IIT Bombay for "Collaborate-Draw," a web tool that allowed multiple users to jointly work on drawings, charts and blueprints. The first-runner up team was also from IIT Bombay ... "Polls," a tool which helps set up your own online opinion poll, quiz your friends or your community and, most usefully, analyse the results at lightning speed in multiple ways.

• Phosphorus compounds made by scientists in India and the US have shown anticancer activity without using metals. Maravanji Balakrishna and Dulal Panda's team at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, and Tulane University, New Orleans, US, has created metal-free compounds with a view to developing novel cancer therapies.

• Following an invitation from the Union Ministry of Urban Development to participate in policy-making and research on urban development and particularly urban transport planning, the Indian Institute of Technology - Powai is proposing an “urban scenario simulator model” that will use real census data, actual traffic data and other accurate inputs to model the response of a city to various interventions through infrastructure building.

• The Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) announced the locations of eight new Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and seven Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) along with 30 Central and ‘world class universities’ to be set up in the country during the 11th Plan period. Out of the eight IITs, first announced by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in his Independence Day speech, one IIT would be set up at Indore in Madhya Pradesh while Orissa, Gujarat and Punjab would get one each. The ministry had earlier announced IITs for Bihar, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh. Medak district near Hyderabad has been identified for Andhra Pradesh IIT, according to state government official.

• For many women, not only in India but even abroad, wedding bells sound the death knell of a career or education. Sudha Murty’s Gently Falls the Bakula is the story of one such woman - Shrimati, who marries her childhood sweetheart and classmate Shrikant despite family opposition. The marriage works, Shrikant does well in his job in a software company, and is in fact the most successful of his IIT Bombay batch, but somewhere along the way his ambitions begin to take a toll on their life.

• Despite being the leader in technical education in the country, IITs are still regarded less than first grade when it comes to providing business education. Management graduates from IITs have education in a technical environment and are thus expected to do well in the technical department. Hence, they are given second preference which does affect the remuneration of these graduates ... while the remuneration for IIM graduates typically averages around Rs 12-15 lakh per annum, a fresh management graduate from IIT pockets only around Rs 6-7 lakh.

• The Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, is gearing up to host the biggest ever gathering of IIT alumni in New York this year to mark the 50th anniversary of its founding. The July 18 through 20 golden jubilee celebration at Marriott Marquis in Times Square will bring Bombay IIT-ians as well as alumni from other IITs from all over the United States as well as from overseas, including India.

• For all its reputation as one of the toughest competitive examinations in the world, IIT-JEE has seen a dramatic fall in standards. Or so it seems from the steep fall in the cutoff marks of each of the three subjects in the last examination as compared with those of the previous one. In 2006, the cutoff marks in maths, physics and chemistry were 37, 48 and 55 respectively. The corresponding marks for IIT-JEE 2007 fell to as low as 1, 4 and 3. The fall in the cutoffs in last year's examination defies logic as the overall performance of candidates actually went up.

• According to the press release of Shailesh J Mehta School of Management, IIT Bombay (SJMSOM) ... the average domestic salary increased by 44% from the previous year’s figure of Rs 9.71 lakhs to Rs 13.96 lakhs this year. 90 pc of the batch received offers of above Rs 10 Lakh per annum. The highest international offer was US$ 85,000 by Olam International (Singapore).

• Alumni in the news ...

  • Raghu Raghuram (MTech '86 EE), vice president of products and solutions, figures to have more than a little influence on the direction and shaping of VMware Inc.'s products and services over the next few years. He holds a master's degree in electrical engineering from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay.

  • Research and analytics firm Dexterity has announced a refocusing of its business on marketing and customer informatics, and appointed former IIT Bombay alumnus and Accenture USA Partner Anantha Krishnan as Chairman and CEO.

  • Ankur Gattani (BTech '06 EnggPhy) has again turned his back on big bucks to pursue his dream. The 23-year-old is the only student in the 2006-08 batch of the postgraduate programme of IIM Calcutta to have opted out of the final placement. Gattani has started a portal, lifeinlines.com, as a first step on his entrepreneurial journey. "You can record little moments of your life on Lifeinlines.” said the IIT Bombay alumnus.

  • Mahindra & Mahindra announced the appointment of Mr. Rajan Wadhera (BTech '79 Aero / MTech '81 Aero) as Executive VP, R&D and Global Product Development, Automotive Sector.

  • Milpitas, California-based Kovair Software, Inc., a Development Life Cycle and IT Software Management company announced that Mr. Raj Mashruwala (BTech '75 ME) a veteran of Tibco Software who has been COO and Executive Vice President of Tibco has joined the Board of Kovair as one of its Directors effective.

  • Dr. Sheel Kant Sharma (MSc '71 Phys / PhD '75 Phys) of India has assumed the office of the Secretary General of SAARC from March 1, 2008. Dr. Sharma had served as Ambassador of India to Vienna. He Joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1973.

  • As a small child growing up in the 1950s in the rural village of Ladnun in the Nagaur district of Rajasthan, Dr. Suresh Sethi (BTech '67 ME) had never even heard of the prestigious IIT Bombay. In March, the highly regarded UT Dallas School of Management professor will be named an IITB Distinguished Alum.

  • An alumnus of IIT Bombay has announced a potentially perfect way to sort and distribute the massive amounts of data that travel daily over optical fibres to people across the world. Rana Biswas (MSc '78 Phys) says that the new technology, a three-dimensional photonic crystal add-drop filter, shows promise to dramatically enhance the transmission of multiple wavelength channels (wavelengths of light) that travel along the same optical fibre.

• Physicist Basanta Nandi, from IIT Mumbai has emerged as the world's 'hottest' reasearcher for 2007, according to annual the league tables published by academic publisher Thomson Scientific. Usually dominated by Japanese and American scientists, this year the trio of high-energy physicists- Mikhail Kopytine, Basanta K. Nandi, and Thomas Peitzmann - top the list with 12 hot papers each, for the first time edging out Japanese and American authors from the position. Their research is about quark-gluon plasma; in layman terms something to do with the state of the universe before the original big bang. Mikhail Kopytin is from Kent State University, US, while Thomas Peitzmann is from Utrecht University, Netherlands.

• "IIT: Insufferable Indian Tribe" ... There are two distinct tribes in India: the one that went to IIT, and the one that did not. If you are wondering, how to tell them apart, I have good news: you do not have to. They would tell you before you can finish your hello. At times all you need is a glance at them, and they are too eager to blurt out, "I am from IIT, and my name is Raju." The other distinguishing characteristic of this tribe: they are insufferable. But as luck would have it, they are easy to spot from far as well - this is the recommended approach. Their tribal songs are everywhere: their license plates, their T-shirts, their coffee mug, their email signature, poster on their bedroom at home and cubicle at work. The first thing you should notice is that there are two "I"s in IIT, and that is no coincidence.

• PanIIT 2008 will be held in Chennai this year on the sylvan IIT Madras campus. This three day event between December 19- 21st, will bring together IIT alumni comprising policy makers, leading academicians, thought leaders, industry captains and more from across the world to discuss and debate ideas, issues and find solutions to create a better India for tomorrow.

• At a function organized to celebrate IIT Bombay's Golden Jubilee, Anand G. Mahindra, in his characteristic style, invoked the lessons from the Bhagvat to show the institutes of excellence a mirror. He raised questions that IITs need to ask themselves - urging them to discover their dharma – to be constant gardener of India’s technological future – to spread excellence as far as it can go without compromising on quality.

• Until about four years ago, Chetan Bhagat was an investment banker ... while others planned weekend excursions on the golf course, Bhagat, then employed by Goldman Sachs, indulged a passion for writing. Today, Bhagat is still an investment banker, now with Deutsche Bank. But he has also become the biggest-selling English-language novelist ever in India. His story of campus life, "Five Point Someone," published in 2004, and a later novel about a call center, sold a combined one million copies. Only the autobiography of the Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi has sold more.

• Kalpesh Khivasara, a student at IIT Bombay, knows he can get a job at a major company. But faced with being a small fish in a big ocean, Khivasara passed on all the big names at campus placements earlier this year. He chose working for a start-up, where a mix of adrenaline, growth and coffee will likely keep him working past midnight. In a few months, as his batchmates begin drawing eye-popping salaries, Khivasara will go to work for INI Consulting Pvt. Ltd, a company focusing on commercializing new technologies from academic and research institutions.To target students like Khivasara, IIT Bombay plans a start-up job fair at the end of the month.

• The Department of Information and Technology (DIT) launched 'The Nanotechnology Development Programme' under which eight small and medium R&D projects and two major projects have been initiated. Between IIT Bombay and IISc, around Rs 100 crore has been spent to set up the infrastructure and machinery. Applied Materials opened a Nanomanufacturing Lab at IIT Bombay. The company contributed equipment worth $7.5 million.

• The signature campaign for Raj Thackeray by actors Nana Patekar, Sajid Khan and others underlines the groundswell of support for the sons of the soil argument. Even north Indians are admitting it ... "Migrants are more dynamic, willing to take on small jobs, sweat more and are cheaper," says Kushal Deb, an Assistant Professor at IIT Mumbai. But he, a Bengali raised in Hyderabad, has overheard murmurs of approval for Thackeray among Maharashtrians at IIT.

• It’s a shiny, new dance floor, but how many can dance? The Web 2.0 market in India is still struggling for direction and funding, though the start-up scene in the Indian consumer space has been vibrant. IIT Mumbai-incubated Uhuroo has had successful test-runs among scattered workforces in companies like Cap Gemini, L&T Infotech and Arch Pharma. "Three of our 10 enterprise deployments so far are up and running," says Uhuroo CEO, Kaushal Sarda.

• Faculty crunch threatens Brand IIT ... Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg, say top IIT representatives, fearing that the faculty-crunch facing the institution could threaten Brand IIT. Their plea comes as the Centre looks to establish more IITs across the country. Over the years, the five older IITs and two recent ones have worked hard to establish higher levels of education, says IIT Bombay’s Director, Professor Ashok Misra, adding that the new technology institutions should not be called IIT. There is a need for several more technology institutions in the country and the IITs could incubate and support them in terms of resources and so on, he explains. He added that Brand IIT comes with its trademark qualities. The IIT brand name should be limited to the time-tested institutions, delivering quality education, Prof Misra said.

• Houston, the world’s energy capital, is used to thinking big. Now Houston has met its match in India. When Ashok Misra, Professor and Director of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay visited Rice University in May last year, he proposed that it should engage with India’s IITs. Eight months after Misra’s journey to Houston, David Leebron, president of Rice University, travelled to Mumbai to attend the Golden Jubilee Celebrations of IIT-B and signed a memorandum of understanding for joint research and student exchange as part of Rice’s second-century objective of growing as an international university.

• The government’s plan to establish a National Knowledge Network by interconnecting all knowledge institutions in the country through an electronic digital broadband network is expected to give the much-needed boost to research and development activities in India and help it catch up with the pace of research happening in other countries. With such connectivity, critical mass between institutions will now happen,” said IIT Bombay R&D Dean Krithi Ramamritham.

• Three more Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) would come up in Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan in fiscal 2008-09, Finance Minister P Chidambaram announced in Parliament. While allocating Rs 344 billion for the education sector – an increase by 20 per cent over – he remarked that the new IITs will start soon. While IITs coming up at Patna in Bihar and Medak in AP is expected to start from the next session in 2008-09, the Rajasthan Government is yet to provide a suitable site for its IIT, considered as a premier engineering institution in the country.

• The Indian industrial and manufacturing boom cannot be sustained if core engineers, especially chemical engineers, do not enter the field they are trained for, according to Ashok Misra, Director, IIT-Bombay. "On behalf of IIT Bombay, I am talking to industry leaders to ensure that engineers are paid as well as software or management professionals."

• While professors and staff-members at IIT-B now have something special to look forward to thanks to the Alumni Centre being planned, the institute has embarked on a major drive whereby its roping in all faculty members to "reconnect" with their former students. office bearers from IIT-B’s Student Alumni Relation Cell (SARC) which has been playing a vital role in alumni networking, may attend the New York Alumni Meet in July 2008.

• About five years ago, students looking to go overseas for an international degree had few options - it was US, US or US. Increasingly, for a variety of non-technical courses, the student population is looking at destinations cheaper or closer home. Parents, say consultants, are picking Singapore or Australia over the US. Jai Nithani, third-year mechanical engineering student from IIT Bombay, says he is intent on going to America after his BTech from the Powai college.

• At a time when corporate slowdown is hitting headlines, IITians are happy that the effect of the weakening dollar has not made any impact on their pay packets. Salaries during placements at the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) this year, has gone up 10-20 per cent. At IIT-Bombay and Kanpur, the highest offers were made for $92,000 per annum and $90,000 per annum by Mercer Oliver Wyman -- a Boston-based financial consulting firm and Lime Group, a US-based financial and technology conglomerate, respectively.

• IIT Mumbai’s Professor Pradipta Banerji says there are some inherent biases in international rankings, for instance they look at research funding in dollar terms, whereas it is much cheaper in India. Some of the factors that have pulled down IITs are now being addressed, at least in Mumbai, says Banerji.

• Alumni in the news ...

  • EMC Data Storage Services India has named Sundar Balasubramanian as general manager, strategy and business productivity at the EMC India Center of Excellence (CoE), EMC’s largest R&D centre outside of North America based out of Bengaluru.

  • A "Che" has nudged a leading Marxist and India’s premier B-school a little closer to putting their heads together on the common man’s problems. IIM Ahmedabad student Chepuri Sri Krishna (BTech '00 Aero) has persuaded the institute into including in its curriculum a project where students advise MPs on development issues in their constituencies.

  • Eight Point Systems, winner of Eureka! 2008, the annual business plan showcase of IIT Bombay, took home not only the Rs. 4 lakh prize money but also a mentor and angel money to the tune of Rs. 50 lakh on Sunday evening. Vaibhav Goel and Puneet Kumar, the team from IIT Bombay, will be funded by Vishal Gondal, CEO and founder, Indiagames.com, in their venture to create a realistic gaming experience for the local market.

  • The huge turnout of students for Utsav - an event organised by the World Alliance for Youth Empowerment (WAYE) under the aegis of 'Art of Living' - is reflective of the stress levels that the youth are subjected to these days. The workshop began with Khurshed Batliwala and Dinesh Ghodke (BTech '97 MetE) giving instructions about the breathing techniques and yogasana.

• The Golden Jubilee Extension Centre of IIT Bombay was inaugurated in Gandhinagar by Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi in the presence of Director Ashok Misra on February 7.

• The Entrepreneurship Summit, a unique initiative by Entrepreneurship Cell of IIT Bombay, serves as a platform for bringing together aspiring and successful entrepreneurs, start-ups, venture capitalists and academicians on a common platform. E-Summit 2008 commemorates the Golden Jubilee celebrations of IIT Bombay with an overlying theme of the "emerging entrepreneurial ecosystem in India".

• Stinking toilets, dilapidated laboratories and old hostels at the IITs may get their first makeover in years with the Centre planning an increase in the funding for the institutes’ day-to-day running. The human resource development ministry plans to raise by 10 per cent the non-plan funds for each IIT and the IISc in Bangalore. IIT Bombay, which receives the maximum maintenance grant among the IITs, will receive over Rs 90 crore for the first year.

• K M Acharya, Special Secretary in Charge of Higher Education in the HRD Ministry, dismissed a suggestion that IIT Mumbai was unable to pay salaries to its faculty, saying there was no such crisis and the government was taking care of them.

• Alumni in the news ...

  • Pramod P. Khargonekar (BTech '77 EE), Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Florida, spoke about the role of the university as a distributor of knowledge that's faced with the challenge of competing in an increasingly innovative and technological global market.

  • Many young educated students have given up a lucrative career to pursue a political dream. Ajit Shukla (DD '02 ME), an IIT Mumbai alumnus spearheads the Bharat Punarnirman Dal (BPD), a party of like-minded educated people who are tired of caste-ridden politics.

  • Optra Systems announced a partnership with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), to jointly design and implement complete imaging software solutions for the life science and health care industry ... Abhijeet Gholap (MTech '94 BioMed), is CEO and President of Optra.

  • Miction, management plus fiction, is how author, Virender Kapoor (MTech '83 CSE) describes his new book - "My honeymoon with a pinch of salt." He is currently the Director of Symbiosis Institute of Telecom Management.

  • A husband-wife team of Indian American scientists, Dr Asha and Dr Anil Oroskar (BTech '77 ChE), are set to take their joint venture Orochem Technologies to a new high now with a recent technical, marketing and financial collaboration with Drug Monitoring and Research Institute (DMRI).

  • Despite competing against giants like Yahoo! and Google, Bhaskar Ballapragada’s (BTech '89 ChE) company, AdOn Network, has made strides in the online advertising industry, attracting a substantial customer base and recognition for its growth.

• Prof. Ram Puniyani and Mumbai-based Setu Charitable Trust have been selected for the National Communal Harmony Award for the year 2007 in the individual and organisation categories. Puniyani, a former Professor at IIT Mumbai, has been spreading the message of peace and amity through lectures, publications, workshops and meetings and by travelling extensively to different parts of the country disseminating messages of secularism, pluralism and communal harmony.

• Several states are competing with one another to house one or more of the 30 world-class universities mooted by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to upgrade the higher education system. The larger blueprint includes an upgrade of the existing eight Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), seven Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and five Indian Institutes of Science ((IISc) and research establishments. Also on the cards are 14 additional IITs and IIMs across the country, for which the human resource development ministry has prepared a blueprint and which has been submitted to the Prime Minister's Office and the Planning Commission, officials said.

• Amphibian vehicles, eco-houses, cracking complex codes, building mighty cranes… these and other equally fantastic innovations will be common place at IIT, Bombay during this weekend. For, starting from Friday, IIT would be hosting three-day-long Techfest 2008, Asia’s largest international science and technology festival. Now in its eleventh year, Techfest has become a platform for showcasing cutting-edge research and bringing together some of the best known names from the world of technology.

• After Ratan Tata's 'Nano', now it is time for another revolution, an electric car. The electric car, developed by IIT Bombay, is named 'E-on'. This is a proto-type of the car which does not require petrol and runs at the speed of 30 km per hour. "We have been working on this project for last one year and now ready to run this car on road," said Professor of Industrial and Automobile Design Kishor Munshi. Initially the car will run in the campus of IIT-B, which plans to modify the car in future. Developers are still testing various options to make it better and commercially viable.

• When IIT Bombay kicked off its Golden Jubilee celebrations, ex-students received a package from their alma mater. It was a news capsule on the engineering college they had graduated from. For many, it evoked warm memories of a leafy campus where they had spent their best years. Along with the CD, the institute had also sent them details of the forthcoming celebrations and a donation form. It was like the perfect marketing pitch: the response was "phenomenal". IIT-B has been snowed under with funds in the last five months. To acknowledge each and every donor, the institute is building a 'Brick Wall of Fame'. Every donor of Rs 1 lakh will find his name on this wall.

• The current fund-crunch in the IITs repeats itself from one campus to another. Hefty donations from alumni and corporates are being ploughed into the IITs to build infrastructure and set up research programmes, but this cannot conceal the fact that government grants for regular expenditure on water, power, materials for labs, etc. are not in keeping with rising costs. In the last three year, IIT-Bombay, as a result, has drawn Rs 31 crore from its endowment fund to meet the shortfall in non-plan expenditure. "This is not conducive for an institution that depends on its savings from capital expenses for future growth," said a senior professor. "The money that has been saved over the years is meant for expansion, not for running the institute on a day-to-day basis."

• Elite IITs go bankrupt, no salary for Mumbai staff ... In a recent development, all the seven institutes have written to the Union HRD Minister saying that they are on the verge of bankruptcy - so much so that IIT Bombay does not even have enough money to pay its staff members their salary for the month of January. The Directors say that the resource crunch is nothing new and that they have been withdrawing money from their corpus for a long time now. However, they insist that they cannot keep on doing the same and that they need the financial aid from the HRD Ministry now to keep afloat.

• Taking another step towards becoming a "world-class research university in science and technology", the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B) will tie up with four foreign universities - Monash University (Australia), Rice University (USA), University of Southhampton (UK) and University of Cambridge (UK) - to collaborate on research.

• In order to maintain "brand value", Directors of two Indian Institute of Technologies have suggested that the proposed additional IITs by the HRD Ministry should not be given the same name. "There is no need at all to name the new institutes as IITs," said Ashok Misra, Director - IIT Mumbai at the New Delhi Chapter of the institute's Golden Jubilee outreach programme. "You don't go about building new Oxfords and Cambridges," he stressed ... echoing Mishra's sentiment, IIT Delhi Director Surendra Prasad said he had serious concerns about the brand value of IIT. "I see no issues in setting up new technical institutes. But there are issues when it comes to calling them IITs."

• The IIT Academic Advisory Council’s Standing Committee will shortly make a presentation to the Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry on the financial needs of the seven IITs, where it will ask the government for over Rs 160 crore (around 20 crore for each IIT) to facilitate the expansion and research programmes at the seven IITs. MS Ananth, Director IIT Madras, says: "We are running in the red ... we have been using our corpus money towards this end and will request for at least Rs 20 crore from the government."

• The world’s smallest wearable cardiac monitor, a toffee-sized silicon locket, is almost ready at IIT Bombay. While the tiny computer that can store a week’s electrocardiogram (ECG) data awaits a manufacturer, it is already in demand. IIT engineers borrow it, rig some adjustments and the locket meant to monitor a heart without hospital visits measures tremors in buildings instead. "I would be the first to buy one for my mother. The basic device is like plug-and-play," said IIT’s professor Rakesh Lal, of the School of Bioscience and Bioengineering, who conceptualised the project with professor S. Mukherji.

• Industrialist Naushad Forbes appealed to the prestigious institutes such as the IITs and IIMs to learn from the "US experience" in the 1950s and 60s of building a research culture and using competition throughout the system. "It will be difficult and painful but we can create a better scenario by implementing it," Forbes, Managing Director of Forbes Marshall said after inaugurating a vice-chancellors' conference at the IIT-Bombay today. Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission Anil Kakodakar inaugrated the three-day conference being held as part of the Golden Jubilee celebrations of IIT Bombay attended by vice-chancellors from across the world.

• Alumni in the news ...

  • Canaan Partners, a $2.3 billion global venture capital firm, announced Harish Gandhi (BTech '92 EE) has joined the firm as Executive Director in Canaan's India offices. In his new role, Gandhi will work to strengthen and expand Canaan's technology investments in the Indian market and will work hand-in-hand with the country's top entrepreneurs to build tomorrow's leading international companies.

  • Berkeley Researchers Make Thermoelectric Breakthrough in Silicon Nanowires ... "This is the first demonstration of high performance thermoelectric capability in silicon" said Arun Majumdar (BTech '85 ME). Dr. Majumdar, who was recently appointed director of Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD) and is a member of the Materials Sciences Division, is an expert on energy conversion and nanoscale science and engineering.

  • Texas Instruments announced that Sameer Pendharkar  (BTech '83) will receive the 2008 Edith and Peter O'Donnell Award. The Edith and Peter O'Donnell Award, established to acknowledge achievements by young investigators in medicine, engineering, science and technology innovations, will recognize Pendharkar for developing innovative power management semiconductor technology to improve the reliability and safety of automotive systems, extend battery life in consumer electronics and improve next-generation video capabilities.

  • i-smart cards in your wallet ... Abhinav Dapke (MDes '98 IDC) has designed the M++CARD which is capable of storing between 10MB and 30MB of information ... a business card with memory may well sound like straight out of a James Bond flick. Having received a few sales enquiries, Mr Dapke is on the lookout for manufacturers.

• Delhi University has been ranked among the top 500 universities of the world by the prestigious Times Higher Education Supplement, QS World University Ratings 2007. It has been ranked 254 ... it has left behind even the prestigious IITs in the rankings. IIT Bombay has been ranked 269th, while IIT Delhi figures as 307 in the list.

• Noted social activist Shailesh Gandhi will be awarded the third ''Nani A Palkhivala Civil Liberties Award'' for preservation and protection of civil liberties in the country. A panel of judges, comprising Justice M N Venkatachaliah, former Chief Justice S N Variava and Justice Sujata Manohar, decided upon Mr Gandhi's name. Mr Gandhi has also been associated with the propagation of the Right to Information Act (RTI). The award will be presented here on January 11, Friday at Tata Theatre, at NCPA, at 6.00pm. Mr. Soli Sorabjee is delivering the Memorial Lecture on "Judicial Activism - Boon or Bane."

• Former President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam will launch PanIIT’s "Entrepreneurship Movement". The mission will be launched by simultaneously mentoring 1000 entrepreneurs in 16 different cities of India on Jan 26th, 2008. Mentors include B Muthuraman (Tata Steel), Pradeep Baijal (Ex-TRAI), Pramod Chaudhari (Praj Industries), R N Khanna (Controls & Switchgear), Saurabh Srivastava (Indian Angel Network), Ashank Desai (Mastech), Pradeep Gupta (CyberMedia) and over 200 successful IITians.

• The batch of 1982 of IIT Bombay had something to gift their alma mater for the new year. Alumni handed over a cheque of Rs 4 crore to the premier engineering institute. With the interest earned on the corpus, every year 25 incoming faculty members at IIT-B will be offered a bonus of Rs 1 lakh for three years. Each year, the Legacy Project sees alumni celebrating its silver jubilee reunion by pledging to take up a project for the institute.

• Alumni in the news ...

  • An IIT Bombay alumnus is working on electric cars that will not only be environmentally friendly, but also give their owners a chance to make lots of money. Ajay Prasad (BTech '83 ME), currently a member of University of Delaware research team, has revealed that the new system is called "vehicle to grid" (V2G).

  • M Natarajan (MTech '70 ME), Scientific Adviser to the Defence Minister, and Secretary, Defence (R&D), will be the recipient of the prestigious CV Raman Birth Centenary Award and a gold medal for outstanding achievements in the field of defence research and development and strategic systems. The award will be conferred on him by the prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, on 3 January during the annual session of the 95th Indian Science Congress.

• Conversion of research activity into entrepreneurial ventures is gradually gaining importance in India. And for academicians like professor A Q Contractor, currently the head of the Chemistry Department at IIT Bombay, such a platform has given a "new lease of life" to his ideas and a chance to "serve the people" ... after the Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE) was initiated in 2004 at IIT Bombay, it gave a boost to his plans to start a company. Dr S Bhat from Bhat Bio-Tech India Private Limited showed interest in the technology being developed by Professor Contractor. Eventually, the two decided to incubate a company, Polymeric Sensors Private Limited, with SINE.

• Professors and staff-members at IIT-B now have something special to look forward to thanks to the Alumni Centre being planned by the institute as part of its Golden Jubilee programmes alongside the initiatives of the Alumni Association (IITBAA). A building housing a full-fledged alumni centre was announced during the Alumni Day celebrations on Sunday. "We are planning to construct a ‘Wall of Fame’ in which each contributing alumnus will be recognised with a name plaque on a brick," said Prof. D B Phatak, convenor of the golden jubilee celebrations. Also, to recognise the efforts of its faculty members, IIT-B will institute chairs for professors and fellowships for assistant and associate professors who "register outstanding performance ... we hope to have 100 such chairs and fellowships whereby top-up salaries will be given for a three-year duration."

• IITians are helping farmers find answers to their crop problems. And they do this with SMSes. Standing in the middle of his vineyard with a laptop in hand, 30-year-old Sandeep Khode is perhaps the face of the new techno-savvy Indian farmer, who gets expert agricultural advice by posting queries online at www.aaqua.org. "This site helps me get good advice and is also a great way to keep a tab on the market," says Sandeep Khode, a grape farmer. A brainchild of IIT Bombay, aaqua (Almost All Questions Answered) does just what its name suggests, with advice on everything from how to improve your crop to tips on marketing the produce.

• Scientists and students at IIT Mumbai have claimed to have developed a unique mobile nano device which can record the heart beat of a person constantly for 12 hours. "We have developed a silicon locket at IIT. It will record ECG for 12 hours in one change of battery. The standard mobile interface will help the user send the SMS to the doctor about the latest ECG. This is going to help the patients immensely," Prof V Ramgopal Rao of IIT Mumbai said.

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