Abu Dhabi: The plans to set up the first Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) campus in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) capital Abu Dhabi are moving forward rapidly, the Emirates News Agency (WAM) reported.
This was informed by the Minister of State for Education, Subhas Sarkar, to Lok Sabha, the lower House of India’s Parliament in a recent discussion.
Recently, a high-level team from IIT Delhi concluded a visit to the UAE capital and held extensive discussions with the Department of Education and Knowledge Abu Dhabi (ADEK) officials and other stakeholders in the UAE over the same.
“The Department of Education and Knowledge, Abu Dhabi was identified as the relevant UAE authority for this purpose. In the first ADEK-IIT meeting, both sides made presentations about their respective organizations and conveyed their eagerness and enthusiasm to move forward with this project,” WAM quoted Sarkar.
Outlining the sequence of events and progress of the IIT’s UAE outreach, the Indian Minister informed Parliament, “In the second ADEK-IIT meeting, ADEK invited representatives from the Department of Economic Development and from the Advanced Technology Research Council who made presentations on the economic vision and the research priorities of Abu Dhabi respectively.”
“On a request from ADEK, IIT Delhi made a presentation on the model followed for mentoring new IITs by the older IITs and shared its experiences in mentoring IIT Ropar and IIT Jammu,” he added.
On February 18, 2022, as part of the India-UAE trade deal signed, India announced to set up the first Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in the UAE.
Since then, the two sides have been in contact to come up with measures to follow up on the proposal. IIT Delhi has a small team stationed on the Abu Dhabi map to implement the proposal.
This will be the first time an IIT would be established outside of the country.
IITs are the national institute of India and presently there are 23 IITs in the country. These 23 IITs are located in various regions of the country offering undergraduate (UG), postgraduate (PG) and doctorate (PhD) level programmes. The top IITs in India are IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay, IIT Kharagpur, and IIT Madras. Predominantly, IITs are known for offering B Tech and M Tech degree programmes.
Admission to IIT is through the Advanced Joint Entrance Examination (JEE). The highest-ranking eligible students in JEE Mains are eligible to appear on the JEE Advanced. Indian expatriate students usually visit India to write these exams.
Among the most famous “IITians” are Google CEO, Sundar Pichai; the face of the Indian IT industry N. R. Narayana Murthy; bestselling novelist and writer Chetan Bhagat; and former Governor and Economist of the Reserve Bank of India Raghuram Rajan.
