Santanu Chaudhury: One who showed solidarity with JNU students is IIT head
NEW DELHI: The HRD ministry has appointed Santanu Chaudhury as Director of IIT Jodhpur, overlooking that fact he was a signatory to a statement issued by the IIT Delhi faculty in 2016 expressing solidarity with JNU, after the Kanhaiya Kumar controversy.
The decision to appoint Chaudhury, however, involved considerable deliberation and consensus building at the highest levels, ET has learnt. The selection committee found Chaudhury was by far the best candidate to steer the new IIT. Despite being a signatory to the statement on JNU, the panel felt he was not ideologically aligned. When his candidature was subjected to Modi government’s ‘7-point screening’ issue came up. The screening begins with vetting a candidate’s internet footprint and ends with PMO clearance. Ideological and political association has been a hurdle for many candidates.
The panel chaired by HRD minister Prakash Javadekar had scientific advisor R Chidambaram, former Nasscom chairperson S Srivastava, former CSIR secretary SK Joshi and higher education secretary R Subhramanyam. Javadekar agreed with the panel and went along.
Currently a CSIR director, Chaudhury is an IIT Kharagpur alumnus and former dean of undergraduate studies at IIT Delhi. He has authored over 250 research publications, filed 12 patents, is co-ordinator of projects under Indian Digital Heritage programme of DST, has contributed new techniques for video compression and developed a new technology for entering Devnagari characters in smartphone and cloud-based image super-resolution scheme which is up for a patent.
Referring to events unfolding then in JNU in 2016, the IIT Delhi faculty statement that Chaudhury signed, condemned “the increasingly narrow definitions of nationalism that are being imposed on the citizens of India and used as instruments for the closing of the Indian mind”. The signatories said they choose to embrace “a nationalism which celebrates our plurality”.
The decision to appoint Chaudhury, however, involved considerable deliberation and consensus building at the highest levels, ET has learnt. The selection committee found Chaudhury was by far the best candidate to steer the new IIT. Despite being a signatory to the statement on JNU, the panel felt he was not ideologically aligned. When his candidature was subjected to Modi government’s ‘7-point screening’ issue came up. The screening begins with vetting a candidate’s internet footprint and ends with PMO clearance. Ideological and political association has been a hurdle for many candidates.
The panel chaired by HRD minister Prakash Javadekar had scientific advisor R Chidambaram, former Nasscom chairperson S Srivastava, former CSIR secretary SK Joshi and higher education secretary R Subhramanyam. Javadekar agreed with the panel and went along.
Currently a CSIR director, Chaudhury is an IIT Kharagpur alumnus and former dean of undergraduate studies at IIT Delhi. He has authored over 250 research publications, filed 12 patents, is co-ordinator of projects under Indian Digital Heritage programme of DST, has contributed new techniques for video compression and developed a new technology for entering Devnagari characters in smartphone and cloud-based image super-resolution scheme which is up for a patent.
Referring to events unfolding then in JNU in 2016, the IIT Delhi faculty statement that Chaudhury signed, condemned “the increasingly narrow definitions of nationalism that are being imposed on the citizens of India and used as instruments for the closing of the Indian mind”. The signatories said they choose to embrace “a nationalism which celebrates our plurality”.
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