Finally a Winning Feat in 2020: Recent Graduates Bag Third Prize in Global Business Challenge 2020
“EcoDabba”, a startup team by IIT Kharagpur graduates comprising Bindu Sancheti and Sourav Kundu from the Dept. of Chemical Engineering and Nikita Agrawal from the Dept. of Agricultural and Food Engineering, has secured 3rd position in the Global Business Challenge 2020.
The challenge for 2020 was to ‘develop novel and sustainable solutions to aid in resource recovery and promote the circular economy’. 153 teams from 23 nations participated in this competition. Ecodabba, a sustainable food packaging solution, conceptualized by these 2020 graduates provided a solution in the reduction of waste in food packaging in the post-pandemic world. The Kgpians who have achieved this feat as a team from India after several years have been awarded AUD 10000 for their innovative business concept.
The Global Business Challenge is a graduate business case competition to design sustainable solutions to global problems. The Global Business Challenge (GBC) is being conducted as a partnership between QUT, The University of Queensland and Griffith University and with the support of government and industry. It is sponsored by the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) through its WIPO GREEN initiative.
IIT Kharagpur has recently sent about 35 students to their hometown in Kolkata. This is one among the several student outreach initiatives taken by the Institute administration in the past two months while the campus adopted social distancing followed by the nation wide lockdown.
Classes at the Institute have gone digital since March 17 in the process of following social distancing. Following the lockdown announcement on March 24, all classes were moved to web-conferencing mode, video lectures of NPTEL, or through email. The academic calendar was also revised with the final semester examination scheduled in July and Autumn semester in August end. Further the Moodle platform was made accessible from outside the Institute LAN for submission of assignments by students from outside the Institute LAN. A crucial part of academic programmes are internships which have been rearranged either in online form with corporate houses or at the Institute. Pre-final year students were offered to opt for internships at any department in the Institute on topics of their choice and as per project availability as part of the ongoing COVID19 e-Learning initiatives. But the initiatives undertaken by the Institute were not only limited to academics.
Interaction at boys hall of residence
A quick look at the social media handles of Director of IIT Kharagpur, Prof. V K Tewari would give a glimpse of student outreach activities undertaken by the Institute extensively in the past few weeks. The Director has visited all the halls of residence and discussed with the students regarding their lifestyle and extracurricular activities while remaining indoors and maintaining social distancing.
“We take pride at IIT KGP for being a home away from home. I have visited my family members at the halls of residence for the past few weeks. We talked about how they are spending their time during lockdown, how to reduce the risk of infection, minimise social gathering and to ensure social distancing and hygiene norms just as we are doing during these visits. And together in our applause we said heartfilled thanks to the security staff, healthcare professionals, mess and sanitation workers and other essential service providers,” said Prof. Tewari.
Director interacting with girl students at a hall of residence
He has also been reaching out to the students and campus community through his social media handle and encouraging them to learn new skills, acquire new knowledge and pursue activities for which otherwise people fall short of time.
Taking the cue from the Director, many students have been keeping themselves busy in activities. Srijita Pal, PhD scholar at the Dept. of Mathematics has joined her friends to learn ballet to continue with a healthy lifestyle. She talked about several students in her hall of residence who are trying their cooking skills and it is not because of any disruption in mess services.
“Mess food continues to be usual but engaging in activities with a friend is helping us sail through the lockdown period,” she said.
Students leaving for Kolkata on IIT buses
In another initiative, the Institute has been arranging for students to return to their hometowns. At present there are more than 5000 students residing on the campus. Out of them close to 700 students have consented to go home. In the first installment, the Institute has arranged for two buses to drop 35 students to their hometown Kolkata. Further plans are being made to send the other students to their home locations across the country. Students opting to go home have been advised to stay in self-isolation for two weeks.
Talking about the initiative, Kinjal Bhattacharyya, research scholar at the Dept. of Civil Engineering said, “My decision to move to Kolkata was to support my parents in daily activities during this time of crisis. The Institute was kind to do all the arrangements from medical checkups, getting permission and arranging hassle-free travel with safe and sanitized institute buses. I will always be indebted to the institute for taking the initiative.”
Kinjal Bhattacharyya with family
His parents Supratip Bhattacharyya and Anuradha Bhattacharyya expressed their gratitude to the IIT KGP security and administration.
“Our son felt completely safe and kept us very well-assured during his stay in the campus. Also we are really happy that he is back now to support us, kudos to the IIT KGP team for taking all the efforts to arrange safe and secure travel of my ward,” they said.
Aniruddha Saha at his hall of residence at IIT KGP
However, the majority of the students have decided to stay back at the campus. While Mouli Majumdar from the Dept. of Architecture and Regional Planning stayed back to complete her PhD project work, Aniruddha Saha from the Dept of Mechanical Engineering, who hails from Barrackpore felt that the campus would be a safer place to stay and would continue with his B.Tech. internship during the summer recess. The students did not have much to complain about except that they were missing their batchmates.
Ankita Gupta who recently reached her home at Basirhat said, “We were looked after quite well with the messes being open and interactions in small groups while maintaining social distancing norms. But being a 1st year M.Sc. student with my friends already away from the campus, I felt being at home would be happier though campus was safer.”
Deepak Verma attending an interactive session by the Director
The Institute has also distributed facial masks to students and made available necessary facilities well within residential boundaries. However, they are also allowed to move outside the hostel for 30-40 minutes, particularly for procuring essential items from the on-campus market. The halls are being sanitized as well at regular intervals with the service staff properly geared with PPEs.
The Institute has been maintaining regular contact with the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India through various platforms and apprising them about student outreach initiatives. The Ministry has set up a web-portal YUKTI (Young India Combating COVID with Knowledge, Technology and Innovation) wherein centrally funded higher educational institutions are to submit reports regarding the efforts and initiatives which have been taken in the wake of COVID-19.
Director, Prof. Tewari thanked Hon’ble Union HRD Minister Shri Ramesh Pokhriyal “Nishank” for his initiative to connect with individual institutions to discuss the wellbeing of the students and campus community and motivate the leadership to continue with their responsibilities and work during these challenging times.
Students from IIT Kharagpur have secured 1st Runners-up position at the NEC Hackathon: Environment for developing environment-friendly and revenue-maximizing business applications for the farming community to manage crop residue. Vaishnav Katiyar, Pranav Agarwal, Paras Chaudhary and Shivam Tiwari, final year students from the Dept. of Architecture & Regional Planning have achieved this feat at the PAN India competition organized by NEC Japan and HackerEarth. The event witnessed participation from 1149 teams from all over the country of which 18 teams reached the finale.
The hackathon enabled participants to identify the challenges, a factor of problems, analyze them and develop a solution using technologies such as FIWARE and other open-source platforms. The participants were encouraged to think of a solution on the platform that can solve the current environmental challenges in India. This year’s themes were air pollution and water pollution.
The IIT Kharagpur team which participated under the name ‘BioNet’ proposed a revolutionary platform for the benefit of farmers and to increase the overall production of Biopellets with better supply chain management. They developed an application which will provide a single platform to the farmers and biofuel plant operators to sell agricultural waste (biomass) and to buy biopellets. The user interface was designed in local languages for ease of use. The proposal also took into consideration in-app bidding process for biopellets buyers to ensure maximum revenue generation and profit maximisation for the farmers. The platform could also be used for selling local agricultural products directly to the customers in the near future.
Explaining the concept team member Shivam Tiwari said, “Air pollution in India is caused by fuelwood and biomass burning, burning of crop residue in agriculture fields on a large scale, emission from vehicles and traffic congestion etc. We have built an android application which provides a single platform to the farmers to sell their crop residue directly to bio-pellet plant operators (Govt./ Pvt.) and further the bio-pellets are sold in the open market using in-app bidding process. This will solve the issue of crop residue burning, thus tackling air pollution and building a healthier living environment in India.”
The final round was held online on March 28-29 due to the novel coronavirus pandemic. The shortlisted participants were invited to submit their prototype on the hackathon website and present their prototypes to NEC through a video conference. The toppers were announced too online video announcements.
NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics company, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. NEC has conducted various hackathons aiming at resolving social challenges in India through technology and in continuation to that they conducted this hackathon focussed on ‘Environment’. The event partner was HackerEarth which has been professionally managing hackathons and programming challenges and coding competitions for developers and companies.
Summer recess has set in at IIT Kharagpur on April 1, preponed by 4 weeks and a revised academic calendar being circulated amidst the novel coronavirus pandemic. Classes at the Institute have gone digital since March 17 in the process of following social distancing.
Online Classes
The first year classes with their larger size were the first to be facilitated on YouTube Live using the National Knowledge Network. The lectures were also video recorded and made available online for future reference. Following the lockdown announcement on March 24, all classes were moved to web-conferencing mode, video lectures of NPTEL, or through email.
Till March 31, 2020, total number of courses offered stood at 388 with registrations from 8025 students to participate in the online classes.
“We procured 200 user licenses of WebEx which allowed us to conduct 100+ lectures at a given point of time. This could practically allow us to conduct all classes as per our academic schedule,” said Prof. Debasis Deb, Dean, Undergraduate Studies.
The Institute has also been conducting online classes using Zoom, G-Suite, Skype, DEEKSHAK (an IITKGP web-conferencing platform). Institute is in the process of procuring 20 user licenses of Zoom for conducting classes uninterruptedly, Teachers are using these online platforms to interact with students for lectures, doubt clearing sessions, tutorials and assignments while emailing and uploading video lectures. The NPTEL platform of the Ministry of Human Resources Development is being widely used for the purpose which has a rich repository of video lectures by various IITs. Students are also being recommended to use the National Digital Library of India (NDLI) platform to access vast digital resources.
Atul Jain, Assistant Professor at the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering who has been teaching a course ‘Mechanics of Composites’ shared his experience on his online teaching and students response tracking. He has been using Microsoft Office extensively to create lectures and share exclusively with students enrolled for the course as unlisted videos on YouTube. He further uses Google Analytics to derive useful insights about student participation and attention span etc.
“From my statistics reveal that the average number of students viewing the lectures within three days of delivery is almost the same as the average attendance in a contact classroom. There is no specific time preferred by the students with the viewing time spread over almost 24 hours. Students have a definite tendency of watching the videos in a smaller time span of less than 10 minutes with about 2.5 views per user on average. This is quite a contrast to the usual 55-60 minutes lecture usually delivered in regular classrooms. This freedom is a major positive in online learning,” said Prof. Jain.
Assignments
Talking about assignments, Prof. Deb informed that the inhouse Moodle facility of IIT Kharagpur has been made available for access from outside the campus LAN.
“The assignments have been emailed while Moodle is being used primarily for computer programming related assignments. BTech and MTech projects related to design and software applications too are being carried out while those requiring laboratory access have been postponed until the reprise of the academic session on June 1,” he said.
Internships
Student internship which is critical at IITs is being considered for the period from April to July session having a break in June for regular classes and exams. The Institute is advising students to opt for online mode for company internships and also to apply to faculty members at the Institute for inhouse internship opportunities.
“We are in the process of allocating students to work as interns at the Institute on various on-going projects, term papers, product development and others. Departments are actively involved with the students to give them the best internship experience in house ” remarked Prof. Deb.
Placement
In a recent development, the Institute has set up a taskforce to monitor placement situation. In the academic year 2019-20, 1306 placement offers were received. Due to the ongoing 19-nCoV pandemic, there has been speculations regarding offers being cancelled by the recruiters at various institutions. The taskforce will liaise with the recruiters and work towards ensuring that the number of offers at Iit Kharagpur remain consistent with those of the past years.
Students from IIT Kharagpur have finished among the toppers in the CoreNet Global Academic Challenge 5.0 organized by CoreNet Global Summit Singapore. The Asia-Pacific global conference which was held in March 2020 had participation from 24 leading universities across 18 countries. Among the other toppers are University of Sydney and Delft University of Technology, Netherlands.
The competition involved the role play of an internal corporate real estate team and develop a proactive strategy towards firstly ‘Recession-proof’, to the extent possible, the corporate real estate portfolio, secondly continue to support the business objectives of the corporation, and thirdly ensure that such a strategy does not negatively impact the company in the unlikely event that a recession does not materialize. The teams proposed innovative solutions to problems faced by real estate professionals linked to top global MNCs.
The team from IIT Kharagpur comprised third-year undergraduate students Vikrant Gupta (Mathematics and Computing), Krishnam Kapoor (Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering), Amrit Goswami (Industrial and Systems Engineering, Financial Engineering), and Eknoor Malhotra (Civil Engineering). Their problem statement involved preparation of a comprehensive action plan for the recession-proof real estate portfolio of an American multinational manufacturer of home applications. The team emphasized on minimizing the negative impacts of such recession proofing in case the anticipated economic downturn does not materialize.
“We prepared and presented a detailed action plan for each of the components in the company’s real estate portfolio including Offices, R&D spaces, Manufacturing Plants and Distribution centers followed by a thorough lease management strategy. Our focus was on leveraging recent technologies including RFID, Blockchain, Advanced Analytics, etc. to enable the company to properly optimize space, inventory, and performance. The goal was to reduce expenditure along with incorporation of flexibility and sustainability in their real estate portfolio to prepare the company for the upcoming recession without hampering its growth potential,” Eknoor.
The competition was open to undergraduate and graduate students all across the world. The first round witnessed a participation from 42 universities across the globe. In the subsequent round, teams had to develop an efficient real estate strategy for a given company in either the financial services, IT, or manufacturing sector. Finally, the top 3 teams presented their solution strategies to an expert panel of senior professionals from organizations including Standard Chartered, HSBC, EY, etc. during the conference.
Prof. Bhaskar Bhowmick from Rajendra Mishra School of Engineering Entrepreneurship, who mentored the four-member team from IIT Kharagpur said, “I congratulate the team for their podium finish. It is a proud moment for IIT Kharagpur. I encourage them to continue their endeavors in this domain and wish them luck for the future. Tackling real-world problems is not a piece of cake. Competitions like Corenet provide a great learning curve and I’m glad to be a part of this team. This performance of the IIT Kharagpur team will encourage many such competitors on the campus.”
CoreNet Global is a non-profit association, headquartered in Atlanta, GA, representing more than 11,000 executives in 50 countries with strategic responsibility for the real estate assets of large corporations. The organization’s mission is to advance the practice of corporate real estate through professional development opportunities, publications, research, conferences, designations and networking in 46 local chapters and networking groups globally. Visit the website to learn more.
IIT Kharagpur’s Undergraduate Students Council has launched KGP Hacks Corona, an initiative for the IIT KGP community to build software and data solutions aimed at tackling various challenges related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The objective as stated by Council representative Santosh T.Y.S.S is not only to engage the students during the isolation period but also create an online space where developers can ideate, experiment and build software solutions. Students can use technologies of their choice in diverse areas to address the thematic areas of the tech challenge.
The thematic areas span over
Health: Address and scale a range of health initiatives, including preventative/hygiene behaviors (especially for at-risk countries and populations), supporting frontline health workers, scaling telemedicine, contact tracing/containment strategies, treatment and diagnosis development.
Vulnerable Populations: The set of problems facing the elderly and the immuno-compromised, such as access to meals and groceries, and supporting those who are losing jobs and income.
Businesses: The set of problems that businesses are facing to stay afloat, collaborate effectively, and move parts of their business online.
Community: Promoting connection to friends, family, and neighbors to combat social isolation and the digitizing of public services for local governments.
Education: Alternative learning environments and tools for students, teachers, and entire school systems.
Entertainment: Alternatives to traditional forms of entertainment that can keep the talent and audiences safe and healthy.
Others as ideated by the students.
On submission of innovative ideas selection would be done on a rolling basis and will be mentored to develop it further.
“Shortlisted solutions would be considered for deployment by scaling it up based on its feasibility. We have made a huge range of COVID references available for online assistance,” said Santosh.
Interested students must join the slack group for KGP hacks Corona: https://bit.ly/3dAmF0V
IIT Kharagpur Students among the Winners of India Finals of CFA Institute Research Challenge 2019-2020
A five-member student team from IIT Kharagpur has qualified for the Asia Pacific round of the CFA Institute Research Challenge 2019-2020. Along with IIM Ahmedabad and IIFT Delhi, the team from IIT Kharagpur have been won the India Finals of this Global level competition held on February 8, 2020. The Asia Pacific round is scheduled to be held on March 18-19 2020 in Seoul, South Korea. The AP Challenge will consist of one winner from each Member Society of the Asia Pacific Region, typically about 16-18 countries.
The final year students Shubham Maheshwari (Dual Degree, Metallurgical and Materials Engineering), Satwik Bansal (Dual Degree, Agricultural and Food Engineering), Daksh Thakkur (Dual Degree, Aerospace Engineering), Ritika Agarwal (Dual Degree, Agricultural and Food Engineering) and Tanay Jagani (Dual Degree, Agricultural and Food Engineering) who are all currently pursuing M.Tech. in Financial Engineering were mentored by Prof. Abhijeet Chandra from Vinod Gupta School of Management, the business school of IIT Kharagpur.
“A rigorous multi-disciplinary academic curriculum along with industry-ready skill-training has helped our students achieve this success at CFA Research Challenge India leg, along with other top b-schools of the country. IIT KGP’s team being only an undergraduate team has stood out in the competition mostly participated by MBA students. Financial Engineering, our unique interdisciplinary program run by the departments of Mathematics, Humanities & Social Sciences and Vinod Gupta School of Management, has always been appreciated by the industry. With our students competing with the best teams of Asia-Pacific region, we will mark our global footprints in financial research and valuation as well,” said Prof. Chandra.
The other finalists for India round included IIM Udaipur, IIM Calcutta, IIM Trichy, IIM Kozhikode, NMIMS. The teams qualified through the respective zonal rounds which witnessed participation from 59 leading business schools from across the country. The finalists presented their equity research on Reliance Nippon, HDFC Life, BATA and Oberoi Realty. The judges panel consisted of industry luminaries viz., Mr. Pankaj Tibrewal, Sr. Vice President & Equity Fund Manager, Kotak AMC, Mr. Varun Gupta, MD, Duff & Phelps (Asia Pacific Leader, Valuation Advisory Services and Country Leader, India) and Mr. Namit Arora, CFA, Managing Partner, IndGrowth Capital.
“It has been a thorough learning experience for us to participate in the CFA Institue Research Challenge. The competition has provided us with a platform to perform equity research under the able guidance of industry leaders of the investment management industry. We are looking forward to the Asia Pacific Regional round in Seoul, South Korea ,” opined partcipants Daksh Thakkur and Shubham Maheshwari.
The CFA Institute Research Challenge is an annual global competition that provides university students with hands-on mentoring and intensive training in financial analysis. Students work in teams to research and analyze a publicly-traded company — sometimes even meeting face-to-face with company management. Each team writes a research report on their assigned company with a buy, sell, or hold recommendation and may be asked to present and defend their analysis to a panel of industry professionals.
With content contributions from CFA Society India, CFA Institute Research Challenge in India
IIT Kharagpur has set a new record by completing 1000+ placements in 5 days. With 144 companies visiting the Institute for recruitment the students have bagged these offers including 282 preplacement offers and 19 offers from Public Sector Units.
The areas which witnessed maximum hiring included software and analytics (60%), core (30%) and banking, finance (10%). Some of the top recruiters are Honeywell with 36 offers followed by EXL with 25 offers and software giant Microsoft with 24 offers. AI MNC Fractal Analytics and major contender of financial sector Barclays making 20 offers each followed by Samsung Research with 19 offers and Master Card with 18 offers. Among the top recruiting Indian companies were Reliance Jio, Udaan, TCG Digital, Axis Bank, ANI Technologies (OLA).
All the major companies across all the sectors are its software, hardware, consulting, core engineering, banking and finance visited the campus and completed their hiring with an average presence of 28 companies per day.
“This has been the fastest 1000 till date and typically one day ahead of the last year. We have a 20-member strong students’ team managing placement right from interacting and inviting companies for placement, to conduct the placement activities led by a group of faculty members, students and officials from the Career Development Centre. All the team members along with the staff of the Career Development Center have been working relentlessly since last month ensuring the best experience for recruiters and students,” said Prof. G P Rajasekhar, Chairman, CDC.
This year the students bagged 43 international offers. While Japan led in international offers with Japanese companies making 28 offers with Accenture Japan as a major recruiter making 19 offers and 9 by Sony Japan, Taiwan’s industry leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd. has offered 9 international positions to the students. This was followed by 6 offers made by major US MNCs including 3 by Microsoft Redmond, 1 each by Uber, PayPal and Honeywell.
“This year international offers have witnessed 69% growth in compared to last years. In the last two years 26 international offers were made and this year we have crossed that benchmark comfortably,” said an official.
Honeywell which has turned out to be the top recruiter with 35 offers in India (Bangalore, Hyderabad), and 1 offer in US (Atlanta) called IIT Kharagpur its natural partner in a press statement issued by the company earlier this week.
“IIT Kharagpur is a natural partner for Honeywell with its diverse and world-class technology talent. The enthusiasm that we are seeing from the Kharagpur student body is invigorating!” said Akshay Bellare, President Honeywell India as per the statement.
Honeywell has earlier hired 40 interns from Summer 2020.
“We are excited to have world-class organizations like Honeywell recruit from our campus. Honeywell, with its legacy of core engineering innovation and connecting hardware and software, is a classic example of the type of companies that are attractive to our students,” reciprocated Prof. Rajasekhar.
Five students till now have been made crore-plus offers. Additionally, more than 13 companies have made offers above ₹30 Lakhs. The true media salary can be estimated at the end of the phase I placement.
The phase I of the placement will tentatively go till December 11 and will resume again from January 1st week which will continue till mid-April, 2019.
Contributor: Prof. Gautam Saha, Dept. of Electronics & Electrical Communications Engineering, IIT Kharagpur
Graphic: Suman Sutradhar; Photos: NSS
A third of the IIT KGP freshman community certainly had an exceptional experience this winter. The annual National Service Scheme (NSS) camp for this year was based at village Shyameshwarpur under Gopali Gram Panchayat of Kharagpur Block I. Activities were also carried out at neighbouring villages, Sholadahar and Nachna. A total of 553 first-year students participated in this one-week long camp that started on 28th November.
Having to arrive by 7 a.m. at the campsite and stay on till past 4 p.m., the volunteers initially had an arduous time. “The first day was really difficult,” Saurabh Mishra, studying at the Dept. of Civil Engineering, from Allahabad confessed. “But as the days progressed, I was surprised that I had started enjoying the camp entirely”.
The first day of the camp witnessed a rally through the village, intended to raise awareness on common social issues via posters, created by the students themselves. A workshop on the principles of First-Aid and the basic know-how of dealing with accidents was conducted on the following day. The next few days were dedicated to advisory and guidance sessions for the volunteers. “The talk on stress management has really changed me,” one camper remarked. “I am very optimistic about the next semester”.
From a pre-camp need-based survey, two villages were identified for cloth distribution and conducting a medical camp for the needy. Old clothes, collected by volunteers from houses within the institute campus a few weeks prior, were distributed freely to approximately 250 villagers of Sholadahar and Nachna. A medical camp was held at Sholadahar, where more than fifty villagers received treatment for free by a team of qualified doctors. The prescribed medicines were also given away free of cost.
In Shyameshwarpur, a team of students worked on clearing a 300-meter stretch of kaccha road, which was impassable due to overgrown thickets and bushes. A villager was pleased about the work completed near her house. “The work is much better than what even paid workers could have done,” she commented in Bengali.
Many students worked on creating much-needed drainage systems within the village. “The work was hard, but we are thoroughly satisfied,” Supreeta Sen, from the Dept. of Chemistry said, grinning. “This place was very rugged and rocky. But it was worth it”. Her team had successfully dug two-feet-deep channels providing drainage to several blocks of houses. Other teams worked on other parts of the village.
The village panchayat identified a parcel of land to develop fruit orchard. The otherwise barren land was of the size of three football grounds. A few teams worked there to do the groundwork for plantation. They dug ground at specified distances, cleared bushes and weeds and made the field ready. This orchard is expected to generate more income for the village. Another team dug deeper into an existing pond aiming to harvest rainwater better.
A street play session, fondly titled the Nukkad Natak, was conducted on the fourth day, addressing the grave social issues that are still found lurking in a modern era. From writing script to conducting the rehearsal and finally, performing the play in front of all was a challenge as most never acted in any play before. The quick learner they are, each team performed well and admits that this was one of the most memorable experiences of the camp.
The counseling centre, IIT Kharagpur, held a talk on substance abuse. Members from St. John Ambulance used mannequins to demonstrate the First-Aid and CPR principles in the camp. Dr. T. K. Bhunia, an Ophthalmologist at Kharagpur sub-divisional government hospital, also addressed the volunteers briefly.
The camp has led to IIT students from all walks of life, all from distant corners of the nation, to come together and volunteer to help the underprivileged. “Our purpose in holding the camp is to make our students aware of the realities of life in rural India,” said Prof. Arghya Deb, Program Coordinator of NSS IIT Kharagpur, when asked for his perspective on the camp. “When I see the enthusiasm with which most of the campers have approached their allotted tasks, I think we have to a large extent achieved this goal.”
While sharing camp experience campers talked about how the camp helped them to connect to India that was largely unknown to them. Now, they can empathize better with the vast majority who are disadvantaged on many counts. Working for a cause and in a backdrop like this helped them develop a rich bonding with fellow students.
Writing camp diary was a part of the daily exercise in this camp. Navonil Natta Barman, a Mechanical Engineering student hailing from North Bengal writes, “The penultimate day of the camp began with the excitement of being able to go home soon. While we were working, we were asked to share our experience at the NSS camp. We all gathered and began to share our experiences. The leaders stated how NSS has brushed their leadership skills. Everyone put forward various aspects but one thing was globally accepted, i.e. the NSS gave us a new family. Although I knew we were all going to meet again in a month’s time, I was emotional for a while.”
The regular activities of NSS IIT Kharagpur comprise of weekly three hours of work in twenty villages and slums of our neighbourhood.
It is the time of the year when all eyes are towards the IITs – as December hits, so does the placement season at IITs. At IIT Kharagpur with 282 PPOs the Institute is aiming to secure 1000+ placements in less than a week’s time. Already three PSUs have recruited and more are expected in the coming months.
This year several first-time recruiters will visit the IIT Kharagpur campus including top corporate brands like Sony Japan, PayPal, P&G India, Nestle India, Nomura. The Institute will also be welcoming back international recruiters like Apple, Microsoft Redmond, Uber, Amex, Qualcomm, Mercari Japan among others.
“We have taken almost all the last year’s companies on board and some prominent Japanese companies along with two US companies. We are expecting double the offer in international profiles,” said an official at the Career Development Centre of IIT Kharagpur.
Apart from the prominent players which recruited last year, seven more companies are on board for the phase one recruitment at the Institute. Most of the profiles are in the areas of software development and consulting. Though there were apprehensions regarding market conditions, the internship and preplacement offers were highly promising touching all time high figures. Read More
Talking about the current market scenario and its potential impact on the recruitment, Prof. G P Rajasekhar, Chairman at IIT Kharagpur’s Career Development Centre remarked, “The PPO rate is very encouraging. We took proactive measures to attract companies by reviewing our Company Relation Index (CRI) and then upgraded a few companies. We are stretching our wings to accommodate more companies on a given day so that companies do have enough pool of students each day.”
A supposed challenge of 2.30 hours distance from Kolkata airport is also being addressed.
On day 1, thirty companies will be recruiting for fifty different profiles. The students are hoping for a high number of shortlisted candidates during the first week which will indicate the final number of offers made. The phase 1 will continue for 3 weeks in December.
An increasing trend in salary also was observed.
“This was expected especially with software and quant companies offering higher packages,” said an official.
A total of 220 companies have registered for recruitment in the phase one who will be interviewing more than 2000 students who have registered for placement opportunities in 2019-2020. By the end of the second phase about 500 students from Undergraduate, Postgraduate and Dual Degrees are expected to opt out from the placement process.
Director, Prof. Tewari thanked Hon’ble Union HRD Minister Shri Ramesh Pokhriyal “Nishank” for his initiative to connect with individual institutions to discuss the wellbeing of the students and campus community and motivate the leadership to continue with their responsibilities and work during these challenging times. 
The first year classes with their larger size were the first to be facilitated on YouTube Live using the National Knowledge Network. The lectures were also video recorded and made available online for future reference. Following the lockdown announcement on March 24, all classes were moved to web-conferencing mode, video lectures of NPTEL, or through email. 
Atul Jain, Assistant Professor at the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering who has been teaching a course ‘Mechanics of Composites’ shared his experience on his online teaching and students response tracking. He has been using Microsoft Office extensively to create lectures and share exclusively with students enrolled for the course as unlisted videos on YouTube. He further uses Google Analytics to derive useful insights about student participation and attention span etc. 
