Alumni pitch for NIT

Jamshedpur, Jan. 28: Old boys of NIT Jamshedpur now have a platform to chip in for their alma mater and do their bit for the poor, with the formation of an ad-hoc committee of the cradle's alumni association and donation of funds to sponsor bright students.

The ad-hoc panel ' declared at Alumni Homecoming 2012 ' will act as a link between various local chapters of the institute's alumni outfits.

Led by S. Ranganathan as president and Tata Steel vice-president (corporate services) Sanjeev Paul and NIT faculty member Malay Neeraj as secretary, the committee will function from the campus with its own 500-sqft office.

"The full-fledged office will act as a link between the alumni both in India and overseas and use their funds for providing scholarship to meritorious but poor students of the institute. This apart, they will be using their influence in arranging placements for graduating students," said a member of the alumni association.

Members of the 1960 batch handed 1,000 US dollars as initial funds to the association for providing scholarships to students. They also asked the association to look for prospects of tying up with global technological institutes of repute to help students gain access to advanced technical know-how and get opportunities to train as interns abroad.

B.K. Sinha, a retired director of Central Mechanical Engineering Research Institute ' a unit of CSIR ' and a graduate of the 1965 batch now based in Bengal, rued the sorry state of the institute's infrastructure by comparison to that of NIT Durgapur.

"I have noticed NIT Durgapur grow leaps and bounds in the last few decades, but during this visit I was dismayed by the poor condition of the infrastructure at my alma mater. There is no dearth of funds, especially as it is now under the HRD ministry," said Sinha.

Eighty-six alumni from the nation and two from overseas attended the daylong meet which began on a sombre note. A two-minute period of silence was observed in the memory of Prasun Anand, Pawne Aditya Vardhan and Sudhir Kumar, the final-year trio who drowned in Asangi river recently.