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The Union government Friday approved an off-campus centre of IIM-Jammu in Srinagar and also sanctioned Rs 51.8 crore to set up the temporary campus, The Indian Express has learnt.
The move comes within days of the Parliament approving a resolution abrogating special status to Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 of the Constitution, and a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised IITs and IIMs for the region in his address to the nation.
Confirming the development, IIM-Jammu director B S Sahay told The Indian Express that the institute has identified a building on the New Airport Road in Srinagar, where its off-campus centre will be temporarily housed.
“We have written to the CPWD (Central Public Works Department) to start work on the building. It should be ready in a few months. To begin with, we will start an incubation centre and offer management development programmes (short-duration programmes ranging from three days to six months),” Sahay said.
Asked when the Srinagar off-campus centre would start full-time MBA programmes, Sahay did not elaborate on the timeline, but said it will happen “soon”.
The HRD Ministry is also learnt to have written to the state seeking allotment of 10 acres to construct the permanent campus of the Srinagar centre.
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IIM-Jammu was established by the NDA government in 2016 along with six other new IIMs in Andhra Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, Punjab and Maharashtra during its term. Sahay is the first director of IIM-Jammu. The institute offers Masters in Business Administration (MBA) and Doctoral Programme (PhD) in Management, and has a student strength of roughly 150.
Although the proposal to set up IIM-Jammu’s off-campus centre in Srinagar has been in the works for less than a year, its approval was expedited in the last few days in the wake of the government’s promise of development in the J&K after its special status and statehood was scrapped, sources said.
