The Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT-D) today signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the establishment of the IIT Delhi campus in Abu Dhabi. The MoU was signed in the presence of the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE.
The new MoU adds to the ‘IITs Go Global’ campaign. This will be the second international IIT campus after IIT Madras Zanzibar.
“An exemplar of New India’s innovation and expertise, the IIT Delhi campus in UAE will be a tower 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,” Indian Minister of Education, Dharmendra Pradhan, tweeted today.
IIT Delhi has already initiated outreach programmes for school students from the UAE as part of its offerings for the academic ecosystem of the country. Short courses and executive programmes for the industry are expected to start soon, the institute said.
The institute also said that degrees will be offered starting in 2024, details of which will be presented in due course. The courses at the IIT Delhi – Abu Dhabi will cover several areas such as Energy and Sustainability, Artificial 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 make a global impact,” Prof. Rangan Banerjee, Director of IIT Delhi said.
The decision to set up an international campus for IIT Delhi in UAE was announced in August 2022. While the decision to establish an IIT in the UAE was reported in the 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 the joint India-UAE vision statement issued on February 18, 2022, after a virtual summit between the leaders of the two countries,…the leaders agreed to establish an Indian Institute of Technology in the United Arab Emirates,” the Ministry of Education had answered in response to a question raised by Congress MP MK Raghavan.
This news comes a little after IIT Madras signed an MoU to set up a campus in Zanzibar, which is also the first ever IIT campus to be led by a woman. Director-in-Charge of IIT Madras Zanzibar, Preeti Aghalayam, said, “I am an alumnus of IIT Madras and doing something of this magnitude for the institute and the country is such a big honour. Every time we visited over here as the IIT Madras contingent, we noticed that the representation of women on their side is quite significant. So, we needed to do this mindfully.”