University of Jaffna and Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gujarat (IITGN) are recently established engineering institutions striving to foster high quality engineering education. They have many things in common, eager to work together in many aspects and they have already started engaging in many activities. University Grants Commission (UGC), in a letter sent in October 2016, encouraged to collaborate with IITGN.
As a part of the collaboration, three Mechanical and Process Engineering final year undergraduate students from the faculty of engineering, University of Jaffna got a golden opportunity to spend their 12 week special industrial training period as summer research interns at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India. The students engaged in this research internship program from 27th March to 16th June 2017. The stipend was fully covered by IITGN while the travel is by University of Jaffna. Short course on infrastructure development with geosynthetics, scheduled on 8th September 2017, is another activity, targets both civil engineering industry and undergraduate students to enhance their knowledge.
To make the collaboration stronger and effective both University of Jaffna and Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gujarat (IITGN) signed an MOU on 8th September 2017 at the faculty of Engineering. The event was graced by the presence of Vice Chancellor, Prof. Ratnam Vigneswaran, and Consul General of India, Jaffna, Sri Lanka, Shri A. Natarajan. Deans of the faculties, Professors from IIT Gandhinagar, Prof. Amit Prashant and Prof. Venkataraman, Prof. K. Chelvakumar, Provincial Directors, Engineers, heads of the departments, and staff members of the faculty of engineering also attended the event.
Prof. K. Chelvakumar has been instrumental in making this collaboration a success. We thank him wholeheartedly for the support throughout.
Followed by the ceremony, the short course on infrastructure development with geosynthetics was conducted by Prof. Amit Prashant and Prof. Venkataraman from IITGN. It was attended by many industry engineers and students. It was held from 10:30 to 17:30 on the same day. The participants were sharing good comments about the short course and requested to continue such in the future as well.