House panel visits NID to assess ‘excellence’ claim

A nine-member team of Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance led by chairman Shanta Kumar visited the National Institute of Design (NID) campus on Thursday to assess its claim for becoming a Centre of Excellence (CoE).

The team, with members from both Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha, saw display work by students of various courses and interacted with the faculty members and students before moving to Gandhinagar to meet state government officials. The NID bill is expected to be put forward during the monsoon session of the Parliament, seeking to bring it at par with the IIT's.

"This is in line with the procedure for the NID bill to be cleared . The team took a look at the facilities and education offered. They also saw the students' diploma projects along with the socio-economic development projects taken up by different departments," said Pradyumna Vyas, Director, NID.

In 2009, the UGC (University Grants Commission) had rejected the institute's plea for deemed university status. To retain its autonomy, NID's governing council had drawn up a draft to apply for the CoE like the IIT's and NIFT Act.

"Once the institute is declared a Centre of Excellence(CoE), we can offer undergraduate and postgraduate degrees rather than diplomas and PhD Degrees, while maintaining our autonomy in terms of curriculum and pedagogy. We want NID to be at par with institutes like IITs," added Vyas.

The bill was introduced in the Rajya Sabha on March 11, 2013 and had then been referred to the Committee on Commerce headed by BJP leader Shanta Kumar.

Presently, NID is recognised as an autonomous body under the DIPP( Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion), Ministry of Commerce and Industry.

Source: Indian Express

NID to redesign Tirupati museum

With the National Institute of Design (NID) bagging the project to redesign the three-decade-old Sri Venkateshwara Museum at Tirupati, devotees to the Andhra Pradesh shrine will be able to see the history of one of the richest and most protected shrines in the world.

The institute, given the project by the Tirupati Tirumala Devasthanam Museum Project Committee, will revamp the temple museum located adjacent to the temple complex in two-year time.

The temple museum body took almost one year to finalise the project with NID, which has formed a core team, led by NID faculty Anil Sinha with colleagues Mihir Bhole, Krishnesh Mehta and Bhadresh Shukla to overlook the project as part of the institute's consultancy services.

"Currently, the museum has no thematic sequence or story. Our idea is to engage with the lakhs of devotees who wait for several hours before they get to enter the temple premises for darshan or prayers. We plan to divide the museum into three areas — pilgrimage, homage and passage. We will try to weave the story of Lord Venkateshwara and the temple around it," said Sinha.

While NID's core team have come up with a concept for the museum, they will research the artifacts within the museum in the next six months.

Source: The Indian Express

Dream never dies: CM ensures it for tribal boy

For 25-year-old Karmu Majhi, the distance from Rayagada to Ahmedabad was unimaginably long. On Wednesday, when he set out for the prestigious National Institute of Design (NID) at Ahmedabad, he would have felt it as the beginning of the journey of his lifetime.

For someone, who hailed from the forested and hilly Uparjhiri village of tribal-dominated Rayagada district’s Kashipur block replete with stories of hunger and cholera outbreaks, pursuing a Degree course in Graphic Designs at the NID was a fairytale that came true.

Thanks to the generous support from Odisha Government, Karmu boarded the train to the Gujarat capital on Wednesday to take admission in the two and a half-year course. Till last Monday though, he would have doubted he could make it. He approached Chief Minister’s Grievance Cell seeking financial support for pursuing the course for which he had toiled day and night.

It had all started with his childhood passion for drawing and painting. He drew his way to top and bagged numerous prizes in his district but his financial background was feeble. He slogged hard and with support from his father, a BPL card holder farmer who had to raise five other children, Karmu had got admitted to BK College of Art, a government college where he studied Visual Art and supported himself by making wooden partitions as a part-time job. 

But dreaming of an NID degree that cost more than Rs two lakh towards course fee was a crime but dream he did.

He appeared for the entrance test and cleared it. He went on to qualify the studio test and personal interview. There were just 15 seats up for grabs and Karmu had one to his name. But it was that Rs two lakh that mattered.

When he approached the CM’s Grievance Cell last Monday, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik directed SC and ST Development Department to contact NID and assure State Government’s willingness to pay Karmu’s course fee which will be transferred electronically.

With NID beckoning, Karmu left for Ahmedabad by train on but not before meeting Naveen at his residence to express his gratitude.

Source: The New Indian Express

NID set to give Heritage Railway Sites a Facelift

The National Institute of Design (NID) and the Ministry of Railways is set to enter into a collaboration to give a facelift to heritage railway sites across the country.

The National Rail Museum (NRM) and its heritage wing in Delhi will soon partner with NID to sign an MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) wherein design students will promote railway’s heritage sites in the country.

As part of the project, students of the design institute will disseminate information at rail museums through digital technology and light, sound and interactive media, designing souvenirs and outdoor signages. “The idea is to give railway museums a facelift and make them more tourist-friendly through effective design intervention, booklets and digital communication,” said Pradyumna Vyas, director of the NID.

The project will cover railway lines built in the nineteenth and early twentieth century by the British in India, like in Darejeeling, Kalka-Shimla, Kangra valley, Kashmir, Nilgiri mountains in southern India and Matheran in Maharashtra.

The railway lines in Darjeeling, Nilgiri mountains and Kalka-Shimla have already been designated as UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The project will be part of the course for NID students. “Souvenirs form a big part of tourism promotion in any country. So it is a great work experience for design students to create relevant designs that showcase the same,” Vyas said.

Officials from heritage wing of the Indian Railways had visited NID last month to explore the possibility of partnering with the institute.

Source: indianexpress

Plan For New NIDs Gains Pace

Plans to set up four new National Institutes of Design (NID) across India are gaining pace with land for the new campuses at Jorhat in Assam, Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh and Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh having already been transferred while the proposed site for a campus in Kurukshetra, Haryana, has been finalised and awaiting a final transfer.

In fact, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is expected to lay the foundation stone for the Hyderabad campus, to be located inside the Central University's sprawling campus there, sometime next month. Singh had last year laid the foundation stone for the campus at Jorhat.

Meanwhile, the governing council of the existing NID — which currently has campuses in Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar and Bangalore — has been directed to begin brainstorming on how the four new NIDs would be governed, particularly on whether they should each have their own directors and governing boards like the IIMs and IITs or be more centralised with one director-general looking after operations in various campuses, as is the case with the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT).

A final call on this is expected to be taken once the Planning Commission (PC) finalises the financial allocation for the new NIDs although the current NID is most likely to handhold the new institutes at least in the beginning, according to NID Director Pradyumna Vyas, who has lately been frequenting Delhi and the planned sites as part of finalisation moves.

On the other hand, the PC has also been lending an attentive ear to a group of senior design faculty calling themselves the Vision First Team and is reportedly considering setting up an Open Design School (ODS) and several Design Innovation Centres (DICs) alongside.

The team enjoys strong backing from Sam Pitroda, chairman of the National Innovation Council, and had in fact gotten a considerable toehold in after the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) — under which NID functions — was forced to float new Request For Proposals (RFPs) for new NIDs in mid-2011. Bids for the first RFP had been found unsatisfactory.

The DIPP had been struggling to get funding for the new institutes after the PC did not provide the Rs 534 crore that were estimated as needed for the project, and had to resort to seeing if a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model could be explored.

Source: Indian Express