The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) has launched an enrolment module for ‘technograhis’, who are students from Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), National Institutes of Technology (NITs), and engineering, planning, and architecture colleges as well as faculty members, academicians, and stakeholders.
According to a press release, Durga Shanker Mishra, the Secretary of MoHUA, explained that interested candidates can register and visit laboratories at six Light House Project (LHP) sites for learning, consultation, generating ideas and solutions, experimentation, innovation, and gaining technical awareness. The LHPs are being built as part of the Global Housing Technology Challenge-India (GHTC- India) initiative under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Urban (PMAY-U) project.
The move will provide candidates with first-hand accounts of the technologies being used in the industry and, in turn, they can adapt and adopt them as per their requirements in the construction sector for a Make-in-India approach, which is the government’s flagship programme to foster domestic production and manufacturing.
The release further added that until the completion of the LHPs within the next twelve months, the technograhis will get regular updates from the sites for information dissemination. An LHP E-Newsletter, which was also launched on the same day, captures the progress of the projects at each location. This will be the first volume of the E-Newsletter. Twelve such E-Newsletters will be released every month to inform the students, faculty, stakeholders, and public about the development works through write-ups and photographs. It is also expected to promote healthy competition among the six states regarding the progress of each site.
The six state-specific LHP booklets are for structured information about each site. They outline the technical specifications and offer an insight into each technology and other details. These booklets will be a one-stop guide for technocrats for information exchange.
MoHUA is promoting the six LHPs as live laboratories for the transfer of technology to the field. The primary goal is to encourage large-scale participation of people to create technical awareness for on-site learning. The foundation stone of LHPs was laid by the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, earlier in January in Indore (Madhya Pradesh), Rajkot (Gujarat), Chennai (Tamil Nadu), Ranchi (Jharkhand), Agartala (Tripura), and Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh).
The LHPs are model housing projects. About 1,000 houses at each location are being built with allied infrastructure facilities. This technology revolution is cost-effective, environment-friendly, disaster-resilient, and promotes quicker construction. The initiative will prove to be a major push towards technical transformation in India, the government claims.
IITs and other top engineering colleges report how companies are actively seeking students who have expertise in data science, machine learning (ML), internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, blockchain, and design thinking.
Emerging technologies are growing rapidly and so are the human resource requirements in these fields. This year, placements for students that learn emerging technologies have been better than last year. In fact, a few institutes have already surpassed last year’s total number of offers in emerging technologies.
For example, IIT-Guwahati received 23 offers for emerging technologies with an average salary of IN 2.4 million; this is while the second phase of recruitment is currently underway.
