New Year gift for JU: an 86-acre campus

The university took over the 86-acre campus situated on Raja S C Mullick Road in Jadavpur on January 1.

The university is yet to decide how this new campus will be utilised.

According to Vice-Chancellor (V-C) Pradip Narayan Ghosh,the university officials are still deliberating on a series of suggestions,which include setting up a research incubator. The university is also planning to set up additional facilities pertaining to management and engineering.

The V-C also promised that the university will absorb the 60-odd employees of the sick PSU. “None of our existing departments will be shifted to the new campus. We will add new facilities at the new campus,” said Pro Vice-Chancellor (academic) of the university,Siddhartha Datta.

The university had to pay Rs 8 crore for the takeover. Most of the money will be spent on repaying the loan and the interest of the NIL. NIL has mortagaged its property to State Bank of India.

The university also aims to connect the existing mother campus of Jadavpur University and the new campus thro-ugh an underground tunnel.

A senior executive council member of the university said that none of the conventional programmes will be housed at the new campus. Some professors of JU have welcomed the decision to take over the NIL land saying that if the land would have been taken over by some private developer then the ambience of the entire area would have been changed.

“It is a great relief that we have got around 86 acres . We will hopefully face no space problem,which we were facing a few years ago,” said Partha Pratim Biswas,an executive council member of Jadavpur University.

The university with a strength of 10,000 students has a 58-acre campus at 188 Raja SC Mullick Road and a 26-acre campus at Sector III,Salt Lake.

The space crunch issue was not only raised by the university but also by the Central monitoring bodies. Last year,the representatives of the National Assessment and Accreditation Council who have rated the university as one of the best in the country (3.61 in a scale of 4) had also asked that the university must expand its campus.