Marcellus D’Souza

Apr 22: Goa Chief Minister today said that land for an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Goa will be handed over in the next 3 months.

Sawant was speaking at the ‘India Economic Conclave’ when he made the announcement. He said, “The issue of land for IIT has been resolved and it will be handed over in the next 2-3 months”.

IIT Goa an autonomous public university. The premier institution has begun functioning in 2016 in a temporary campus housed at Goa Engineering College (GEC) Campus located at Farmagudi, Ponda.

“Research grants have not been forthcoming because of the limited space necessary to create the related laboratory infrastructure. The large research grants are meant to create an ecosystem involving nearby educational institutions in research activities. This is a lost for IIT Goa and the other educational institutions in Goa”, said a student..

Goa Government had identified land for a permanent campus in Guleli village panchayat in North Goa's Sattari sub district, measures approximately 320 acres, has been approved by Union Ministry of Human Resources Development (HRD). The MHRD expects that the IIT Goa will function from the temporary campus for just the initial three years and is expected to move to its permanent facility by the fourth year.

In May 2020, four years after IIT Goa started running, Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant handed over documents of transfer of land (admeasuring 10 lakh square meters) in Melauli, Sattari, to the Director of IIT Goa, Prof. B.K. Mishra. This was far from the first site on which the government was trying to build the IIT Goa campus. Prior to this, sites at Canacona and Sanguem were identified, but plans to set up the campus in these places were scrapped after resistance and opposition from local residents in both these areas.

However, protests by residents over the Melauli site which had started in February 2020, continued in the following months. In August 2020, the residents of Melauli organized a particularly unique protest, tying rakhis to the trees that the government had marked for felling for the proposed IIT Goa project. The reasons for opposing the project, is that the site is a forest area. Located at the foothills of the Western Ghats, the land is covered with cashew trees that the villagers claim, have sustained them for generations. As such, they have been demanding that the government find an alternative site for the IIT campus, which will not cause as much loss to the environment.

IIT Goa currently B.Tech, M.Tech and PhD courses in various core and one non-core branches majorly in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics and Computing.

As part of the mentorship plan, IIT-Bombay was the mentor for IIT-Goa for three pioneer years. The HRD Ministry had set up an IIT monitoring cell at IIT-Bombay and the committee members had been designated as officials on special duty to supervise the process of setting up IIT-Goa.