A five-member team of PEC university students is participating in the first annual Spaceport America Cup: Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC) in June. How will it benefit the students?

I am proud of the Vigyan group of students for this great achievement, which has happened for the first time in our institute. It is an inter-disciplinary team and that should be the case, if we really want to do challenging projects. Further, the students have collaborated with ISRO and industry as well for this project. The institute is putting a lot of emphasis on industry connect. Fortunately, a number of industries, corporates and alumni are coming to the institute with their intellect in mentoring students and faculty, sponsoring projects in cutting-edge technologies, establishing laboratories and centres of excellence. Very soon, the institute is going to have smart city innovation centre with the support of government, industries and start-ups. This is what is called real academic-government-industry-alumni connect.

What are the various efforts made by the university for training the students for such a large programme?

The institute supports, both financially and intellectually, all the projects, which have societal impact both at national and regional level. For example, a group of students is assisting UT Administration in carrying out drone mapping for assessment of properties in the city. Another group of students has developed an audio guide for Chandigarh Museum which would be extended to Rock Garden and other such tourist places in the city. The institute is also supporting two start-ups created by two groups of students. One is working on development of Brail Printer for blinds and the team is currently in USA. A US-based company will also support them financially to take the project forward. Another start-up has started working on growing plants using air-phonics, which is a new technique.

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PEC University of Technology has dropped from rank 38 to 85 in the latest National Institute of Ranking Framework (NIFR). What has led to this downfall?

There could be several reasons. NIRF itself is evolving. There could be missing and incomplete data; change in the method of evaluation of various parameters over last year and several others. We are still analysing this and would be able to provide proper response based on facts and figures in a couple of weeks.

What initiatives and research projects would be taken under the Kalpana Chawla Chair?

The Kalpana Chawla Chair of Geospatial Technology has been established by the Indian Railways with an endowment of Rs 10 crore. The income from this endowment will be used to establish a centre of excellence in geospatial technology, which has a key role to play in all kinds of infrastructure development projects in the country such as smart cities, rail networks, road transports, intelligent transport systems, smart grids, waterways, interlinking of rivers, disaster management and many more. The dreams of GOI schemes of Bharat Mala, Sagar Mala and bullet trains can be fulfilled by appropriately utilising geospatial technologies; be it GIS, GPS, electronic surveying, satellite data processing, LIDAR data processing, drone or UAV-based photography. The chair will, however, focus on projects conceived by Indian Railways on rail route alignments, property surveys, 3D modelling and visualisation of rail route alignments, GIS-based rail traffic management and monitoring systems, accident mapping, EIA studies for rail networks etc.

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