President Droupadi Murmu.President Droupadi Murmu has approved the appointment of directors to eight Indian Institutes of Technology, the Ministry of Education announced on Monday. These are the first major set of appointments in higher education institutes approved by President Murmu after she took charge in July.
The IITs that are set to get new directors include the campuses in Palakkad, Tirupati, Dharwad, Bhilai, Gandhinagar, Bhubaneswar, Goa, and Jammu.
The new appointees are all serving directors or professors at IITs. For instance, Prof A Seshadri Sekhar, currently attached with the Department of Mechanical Engineering at IIT Madras, will be the new director of IIT Palakkad.
IIT Tirupati will be headed by Prof K N Satyanaryana, who is currently the director of IIT Tirupati. Prof Venkappayya R Desai of IIT Kharagpur’s Civil Engineering Department will head IIT Dharwad.
Among others, the current director of IIT Bhilai, Prof Rajat Moona, will next head IIT Gandhinagar. The previous director of IIT Gandhinagar has been appointed the vice-chancellor of Banaras Hindu University.
IIT Bhilai will be headed by Prof Rajiv Prakash of the School of Material Science and Technology, IIT (BHU). Prof Shreepad Karmalkar of IIT Madras’s Department of Electrical Engineering will lead IIT Bhubaneswar.
Dr Pasumarthy Seshu, director of IIT Dharwad, will be the chief of IIT Goa, while acting IIT Jammu director Prof Manoj Singh Gaur will now be the full-time director of the institute.
Many of these institutions have been without directors for years, which is seen as having made the government go against the usual practice and notify these appointments in bulk. Incidentally, former President Ramnath Kovind had, in July 2021, appointed vice-chancellors to 12 universities.
Meanwhile, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who is on an official visit to Tamil Nadu, on Monday said at an event in IIT Madras: “IITs are not just educational institutions, they are the temples to create a scientific temper and shape humanity’s future. Our society has great expectations from IITs. Our IITians have to be torchbearer’s of growth and development.”