BITS Pilani Hyderabad: Revolutionising Education For Industry And Entrepreneurs

What are the university's current initiatives to enhance industry collaboration and experiential learning opportunities for students?

The University has always strived to produce students who are industry ready. The Practise School 1 and Practise School 2, which are unique academic programmes amongst all Indian colleges and universities are classic examples of that.

The industry landscape is rapidly changing and so are our students. We not only encourage them to engage in industry centric projects, but have also recently offered full time and part time faculty positions to people who have superannuated from various sectors (as Professors of Practice) and adjunct positions to people actively employed in industry.

Further, various drives have been taken to attract people from industry to do their projects with us for higher academic degrees or suggest projects which should be pursued in academic institutions like ours. These people bring a completely different perspective to both faculty and their younger colleagues in the classroom and beyond.
 

How is BITS Pilani, Hyderabad adapting its curriculum to meet the evolving demands of industries and technological advancements?

It has been recognised that it is high time that the system of education and the overall curriculum needs to reflect the ground scenario. If you look at every senate meeting of BITS Pilani, you will see new electives being offered and even new degree programmes (major, minor and higher degree) being introduced. As such BITS Pilani is dynamic in that regard, although caution is taken that such courses have enough traction amongst recruiters and students alike.

We must remember that our original curriculum was developed with the help of faculty from MIT (USA) in the 1960-s after that significant changes have taken place all over the world. MIT has evolved significantly, many Technology and Science institutes have opened up in India (including IIT-s, NIT-s and private institutes). While maintaining our standards (BITS Pilani, Pilani, Goa and Hyderabad campuses are the destination of choice for many aspiring students), it is also felt that BITS also needs a significant revamping of the curriculum. A massive exercise is underway, which we should be able to implement from the 2025-26 academic year.

How does BITS Pilani support entrepreneurship among its students?

Entrepreneurship arises from an understanding of the market, the unmet needs and sometimes recognising that, with a particular innovative product a need may also be created in the market. The seeds of entrepreneurship are sown early (as in sending all students to a supervised industry exposure programme i.e. practice school 1) and frequently students come up with innovative ideas which they can try out in the “sandboxes” that are a feature of all campuses.

If the prototype or idea is indeed useful, there are business incubators in each campus (for that matter Goa has two) where the students are helped towards realising their goals, via easy to use space, common use equipment and in cases seed funding as well. These incubators, by the way, are open to all i.e. we accept applications and help students from other institutes also.

We have also started a couple of new programmes viz. SIRE (School for Interdisciplinary Research and Entrepreneurship) and a structured programme for Education and Training for aspiring entrepreneurs. These programmes are being rolled out and soon we hope to see the effects of these on our entrepreneurial ecosystem.
 

Could you discuss BITS Pilani's approach to financial planning and budgeting, especially in relation to maintaining academic excellence and infrastructure development?

At the very beginning, one has to remember that BITS Pilani, is by and large, a self-sustaining institute. Although we get grants from scientific funding agencies for targeted projects, they are mostly based on scientific deliverables and are handled by a one or a group of faculty members specialised in that area. So, for the rest of the finances, which is actually the lion’s share (i.e. salaries, classrooms, labs, faculty and student housing, buildings, playgrounds and other necessary infrastructure to maintain a world-class campus), we have to depend mostly on student tuition fees.

We have to also understand that, BITS Pilani is on a path to establishing itself as a research place to go to, while maintaining the quality of undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and training. We also do not believe the very large class sizes (for that affects our primary goal). We try to maintain the student to faculty ratio as close to 15:1 as possible.

Having said these, the process of financial planning and budgeting might be discussed in proper perspective. In any given year, the top priorities are teaching labs, classroom, infrastructure and hostels. These, along with some research equipment required for post-graduate research form the bulk of the CAPEX and are prioritised according to needs of immediacy. The OPEX primarily consists of salaries and maintaining the existing infrastructure. All this is possible due to the highly dedicated staff and faculty of the institute, who work beyond the call of duty to make sure that BITS Pilani retains its excellence year after year.

Mayank Badhwar

BW Reporters The reporter works as Senior Correspondent with BW Businessworld