The Indian Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, is set to open a campus in Abu Dhabi with an MoU being signed between the Ministry of Education and the Abu Dhabi Department of Education and Knowledge in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan on Saturday.
This will be IIT’s second international campus. Earlier, IIT-Madras had on July 6 signed an MoU to set up a campus in Zanzibar.Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said in a tweet, “An exemplar of New India’s innovation and expertise, the IIT-Delhi campus in UAE will be an edifice of India-UAE friendship. It will set a brand new template for leveraging the power of knowledge for both mutual prosperity and global good as envisioned in NEP.”IIT-Delhi has already initiated outreach programmes for students in the UAE. Short courses and executive programmes for the industry are expected to start soon, the institute said.
The institute said degrees will be offered starting 2024, details of which will be presented in due course. Courses at IIT Delhi-Abu Dhabi will cover several areas such as Energy and Sustainability; Art-ificial Intelligence; Computer Science and Engineering; Healthcare; Mathematics and Computing; and other disciplines of engineering, sciences and humanities.
“Our new Abu Dhabi campus is a challenge and opportunity for us to ensure that our education and research makes a global impact,” said IIT-Delhi Director Professor Rangan Banerjee.
The decision to set up an international IIT campus in the UAE was announced in August 2022. It was also laid out in a vision statement issued jointly by the two countries in February 2022. The government chose IIT-Delhi, which had earlier expressed interest in having campuses in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to execute the proposal.
As per a statement released by IIT-Delhi on Saturday, “IIT Delhi-Abu Dhabi will complement the academic, research and innovation ecosystem in Abu Dhabi through collaboration with key players such as Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence; Khalifa University; New York University, Abu Dhabi; Technology Innovation Institute; and Hub71 to offer complementary programmes, conduct cutting-edge research and advance local startup ecosystem.”
The statement further said the campus is expected to launch its academic programmes in 2024 — Bachelors, Masters and PhD.
The IIT-Madras campus in Zanzibar is the first to be led by a woman. Director-incharge of IIT-Madras Zanzibar, Preeti Aghalayam, said, “I am an alumnus of IIT-Madras and doing something of this magnitude for the institute and country is an honour. Every time we visited (Zanzibar) as (part of) the IIT-Madras contingent, we noticed that representation of women on their side was quite significant. So, it was important we do this mindfully.”
