Mumbai: Indian Institute of Technology Bombay which was the first major institute to scrap face-to-face lectures this year amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, held its 58th convocation in “virtual reality mode” on Sunday.
Nobel prize winner Professor Duncan Haldane was invited as the chief guest and the students too were present but not in congregation rather in avatar form on a virtual stage.
“There is a lesson for everyone involved in research,” Professor D Haldane, a British-born physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2016, said during the nearly two-hour long event, which was streamed live.
Guest of Honour Stephen A Schwarzman, world’s renowned investor and philanthropist, said: “India is poised to stake its claim as one of the world’s great innovation hubs”
In a Facebook post, IIT Bombay Director Subhasis Chaudhuri said: “For IIT Bombay, students are the first priority. We took the first step in India in concretely deciding how we must bring a closure to the current semester to help our students.”
“But given the current condition of the pandemic, how do we plan for the next semester for our students? Again, after a long deliberation in the Senate, we have decided that the next semester will be run purely in the online mode so that there is no compromise on the safety and well-being of the students,” he further said.
He also made an appeal to help the needy students. “We have estimated that we need about ₹ 5 crores to help those needy students. We look forward to your overwhelming support to help these bright young minds to continue their learning without any further hindrances or delays,” Mr Chaudhuri wrote on Facebook.
Maharashtra is the worst-affected state in the country with over 6.7 lakh cases recorded so far.