REIMAGINING ENGINEERING

Plaksha University in Mohali, Punjab, seeks to “reimagine” engineering education. Its first Vice-Chancellor and former director of Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, Rudra Pratap, spoke to Careers360 about what that means, why Plaksha has no conventional departments, what it is doing to avoid ‘silos’ and help Punjab. Edited excerpts below.

- Sheena Sachdeva

Q. Recently, Plaksha partnered with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) to foster faculty and student mobility. How is this partnership shaping up? What other partnerships are in the pipeline?

A. With the IISc we signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) recently, although the work has been happening ever since we came into existence. Plaksha has an undergraduate major in robotics and cyber-physical systems and IISc has a cyber-physical systems centre, the oldest in the country. It is now 10 years old and has received a generous grant from Robert Bosch Foundation, Germany. I was connected to the centre during my tenure at the IISc. When I came to Plaksha, my immediate thought was to work with the centre.

IISc also has a Centre of Nanoscience and Engineering which has modern laboratory fabrication facilities and it's hard for any institution to build it. This is a world-class centre and you can't replicate it. Universities need to collaborate and use these facilities rather than replicating them. For instance, we have good maker's systems here. In robotics and cyber-physical systems, it's important to build what you dream of quickly. But for that, you need several machines and technologies. It's not prototyping that could be done with 3D printers. These machines are available at Plaksha's Makerspace easily. This is valuable to IISc students and faculty.

Q. Plaksha states it intends to reimagine engineering education, entrepreneurship and innovation and solving India's grand challenges. What initiatives have you planned to achieve these goals?