Higher education gets a boost with IIIT in Bengal

The central government has approved the plan of setting up an Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) in West Bengal. Debesh Das, the Information Technology Minister for the state conveyed that the centre will provide 50 percent of the cost, state will provide 35 percent and the rest will come from the industry. The move to start an IIIT emanated from the statistics that there were around 32000 people working in the IT sector in 2006, which increased to 105000 in 2010. The IT export in 2006 stood at 2700 crore and in 2010, it increased to 6500 crore. Hence the need to set up such an institute emerged. Mr. Das also added that in these four years (from 2006 to 2010), several IT firms, including Infosys, Wipro, TCS, Patni and Tech Mahindra, have bought land for their campuses here. They have more potential, to use this potential they need things (infrastructure) to be tripled in the coming three to four years, he added.