education

Updated: Jul 02, 2019 07:57 IST

One of India’s best known engineering colleges, the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT-K), is venturing into specialised medical education and plans to set up a super-speciality hospital and medical college in an attempt to further its own research in areas of bioengineering and bioscience, an intersection of engineering and medicine.

The hospital and medical college, proposed to be set up with a total outlay of Rs 800 crore, if approved, is to come up on a 20-acre plot of land in Shivli area near the engineering college, a senior official of IIT-K said on Monday.

IIT-K director, Abhay Karandikar, said: “The project is in the proposal stage and will take concrete shape once the detailed project report (DPR) is ready.”

Karandikar has constituted a five-member committee, headed by S Ganesh, dean, research and development, to oversee the plan. Other members of the committee are Pradeep Sinha, Onkar Dixit, Sandeep Varma and Amitabh Bandopadhyaya. The committee has been asked to prepare the DPR in association with experts at the Tata Trusts.

Two members of the committee who asked not to be named said that the DPR, once ready, will be submitted to the Union government and work will begin after getting the government’s go-ahead.

An IIT-K official, who asked not to be named, said: “Once the project takes shape, IIT-K will be the first institute in the country where students not only get technical education but also carry out research on deadly diseases in association with medical experts.”