• Prof. Abhijeet Banerjee, Nobel Laureate, Economic Sciences 2019 and Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT to be Chief Guest

New Delhi: The 53rd Annual Convocation Ceremony of IIT Delhi will be held on November 5, 2022. Prof. Abhijeet Banerjee, Nobel Laureate, Economic Sciences 2019 and Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will be the Chief Guest on the occasion.

Prof. Rangan Banerjee, Director, IIT Delhi, while addressing the media on Friday, said that 2100 graduating students would be awarded degrees and diplomas at the convocation ceremony.

Degrees and diplomas will be awarded for the first time to the students graduating in the following new programs: Joint PhD (IIT Delhi and NYCU, Taiwan), joint PG Diploma in Visionary Leadership for Manufacturing (jointly with NITIE Mumbai), MS (R) in Sensors, Instrumentation, and Cyber-Physical Systems Engineering, M.Sc. in Cognitive Science, and M.Sc. in Economics.

The Institute will award the President’s Gold Medal, Director’s Gold Medal, Dr. Shankar Dayal Sharma (Former President of India) Gold Medal, Perfect Ten Gold Medal and Institute Silver Medal to the meritorious students. 

IIT Delhi will honor its thirteen esteemed alumni with the coveted Alumni Awards 2022 viz. Distinguished Alumni Award (DAA), Graduates of Last Decade (GOLD) Award and Distinguished Alumni Service Award (DASA) at the 53rd convocation.

Infrastructure
This year, three centrally air-conditioned student hostels named Dronagiri, Saptagiri and Sahyadri have been constructed and students have been onboarded. The total number of rooms taken together is 1208, out of which, Sahyadri is a girl’s hostel with a capacity of 320 rooms.

The BoG has given approval for construction of 5 new infrastructure projects totalling Rs. 680 crore. These include- Girls hostel, Boys hostel, Academic Block, Staff and Faculty housing.

IIT Delhi will very soon undertake a drive to install Electric Vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure throughout the campus to promote the usage of EVs.

Mittal Sports Complex, which is partly funded by IIT Delhi Alumni - Mr. Saurabh Mittal, was inaugurated and is fully functional. The 2022 Inter-IIT Sports Meet will take place at the state-of-the-art facilities in this complex.

In the financial year 2021-22, 286 sponsored projects with total funding of Rs. 351.90 Crores were undertaken through the Institute’s Industrial Research and Development (IRD) Unit and the Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT), which is an industry interface organisation at IIT Delhi. 

346 consultancy jobs with total funding of Rs. 34.33 Crores were undertaken through the IRD Unit and FITT in the financial year 2021-22. During the period 2021-22, 111 IPs were filed. 

FITT, which administers collaborative R&D and investigative projects at the Institute, contracted 79 technology development and transfer projects worth Rs. 38.00 Cr with industry, government departments, and foreign agencies between November 2021 and September 2022.

GMR Power and Urban Infra Ltd., Mumbai, and IIT Delhi have partnered with each other through the IRD Unit to establish the GMR Centre for Excellence (CoE) on New Energy Technologies at IIT Delhi. The CoE will undertake research & academic activities in the areas of new energy technologies.

A Centre of Excellence (CoE) focusing on Process Safety, Risk Management & Green Hydrogen has been set up at IIT Delhi under the aegis of FITT with Nayara Energy and Gexcon India as partners. Broadly, the CoE shall: (a) Enable scientific and industrial R&D collaborations; (b) Conduct courses/training programs in process safety; (c) Work closely with Indian Regulatory Bodies; (d) Develop expertise in forensic audits of accidents; (e) Build a strong pool of experts and knowledge engineers, etc.

The curriculum review committee has presented the first concept note. Discussions with the academic units at the Institute is going on. Based on the discussion, a revised concept note will be made ready for a wider external stakeholder consultation. The Institute will consult with the industry, alumni and the society.

The last placement season at IIT Delhi in the academic year 2021-22 broke all the previous records. Over 1300 job offers were received from over 600 companies offering over 1000 job roles by final year students. Also, over 830 internship offers were received by the non-final year UG students from over 200 companies. This is the highest ever number of offers received by the students through the Institute’s Office of Career Services (OCS) for both placement and internship. Face-to-face processes for the placement season in the academic year 2022-23 will commence on December 1st, 2022. IIT Delhi is expecting a robust hiring season.

To help students prepare for the forthcoming placement season, the Alumni Relations Department of the Institute will organise "mock interview" sessions for them. This is a successful initiative that saw over 400 mock interviews during the last placement season. Under this initiative, the esteemed alumni community of IIT Delhi conducts mock interviews with the students.

At DefExpo2022, India's flagship defence exhibition organised in Gujarat on October 19, Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi was briefed about a technology developed by FITT-IIT Delhi incubated, faculty led startup- CYRAN AI Solutions, by Prof Manan Suri. The innovation has been developed under the iDEX program of the Ministry of Defence, Govt. of India.

The Union Defence Minister, Shri Rajnath Singh, honored the startup with the "Raksha Mantri's Award for Excellence in Aerospace and Defence Sector" on October 20 in the presence of CDS General Anil Chauhan, the Defence Secretary and the chiefs of the three services of the Indian Armed Forces. All these dignitaries and other senior officials of the Defence Ministry were also briefed on the innovation by the IIT Delhi startup and they were appreciative of the same.

Project SAMEER 
Delhi Research Implementation and Innovation (DRIIV), an initiative of the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India, has partnered with IIT Delhi’s Arun Duggal Centre of Excellence for Research in Climate Change and Air Pollution (CERCA) to conduct a technology pilot - Project SAMEER i.e. Solutions for Air-pollution Mitigation through Engagement, Engineering, and Research in Delhi NCR from November 2022 - February 2023. 

The pilot will adopt a three-pronged approach:
•    Awareness and community engagement
Doctors and health practitioners will engage with communities such as farmers, school and college students, RWAs, urban slums etc. to create awareness about the adverse health impact of air pollution. Human activities are largely responsible for intolerably high PM 2.5 and PM 10 levels, coupled with weather conditions. A scientific understanding of the causes of air pollution and the proactive steps that can be taken to mitigate it is a critical first step. 
•    Science and technology interventions to monitor and reduce PM 2.5 and PM 10 levels 
•    These solutions will be deployed as a pilot in high-AQI areas of Delhi and Gurugram to assess their efficacy.
•    Industry roundtables and workshops
Senior leaders from the industry will be mobilized to adopt and support technological solutions to environmental problems.

The Institute is also working on strengthening the existing Governance Framework on Air Pollution Management under the leadership of Prof Mukesh Khare, Civil Engineering Department, covering all three layers of Air Pollution Governance - Central level, State level, and Municipal/Local level. This is being done to evolve a strategic air pollution management governance framework to t    ackle episodic air pollution events like it is happening currently.

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