Quote:In a landmark decision, the newly-elected BJP-led Odisha government has buckled up to develop the Twin City (Cuttack and Bhubaneswar) into a Triple City with the holy city of Puri being included, informed Housing & Urban Development Minister Krushna Chandra Mahapatra.

With all world-class facilities, the Twin Cities of Cuttack & Bhubaneswar will be re-developed into Triple Cities of Cuttack-Bhubaneswar-Puri, Mahapatra said. The H&UD Minister stated that the metro rail scheme launched in Bhubaneswar will be implemented by connecting Cuttack-BBSR-Puri in the coming days.

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Quote:Government proposes nine higher education hub cities
Shuriah Niazi  12 February 2021

The Indian government plans higher education hubs in nine cities, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced during her budget speech last week.

Sitharaman unveiled a proposal to set up formal ‘umbrella structures’ to capitalise on ‘research synergies’ between research institutions, universities and colleges, while also maintaining internal autonomy of institutions.

Nine cities will have a ‘higher education cluster’ each, for better collaboration among institutions and assisting collective development without limiting their individual autonomy, Sitharaman said in her address to parliament.

Sitharaman named the southern city of Hyderabad in Telangana state as an example, with 40 major institutions. 
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Although the other clusters have not been named, experts said in addition to Hyderabad they are likely in Delhi, Bangalore and Pune.

Better coordination

Sitharaman said higher education clusters would ensure better coordination, resource sharing, and collaboration for teaching and learning, as well as research and development. It will allow good private and public universities in a particular city to collaborate and encourage partnerships across institutions.
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Under the budget, the government is proposing ‘Glue Grants’ – a reference to large scale collaborative project awards in the United States to enable consortia of multidisciplinary research teams to solve major medical and biomedical problems – to create the umbrella structures for the clusters, the office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) to the government of India said in its commentary on the budget.

University leaders said they were waiting for more details so that the intention and purpose of establishing university clusters could become clearer.

But moves are already underway to set up science and technology (S&T) clusters in some states, spearheaded by the PSA.

“The PSA office is leading this initiative and has planned to support six clusters – Bangalore, Bhubaneshwar, Delhi, Jodhpur, Hyderabad and Pune – with a seed grant,” Ashok Ganguli, deputy director for strategy and planning at IIT Delhi, told University World News.

“Four mega-city S&T clusters are being planned in Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad and Pune, based on the large number of institutions and knowledge resources and industries available in these regions,” Ganguli said, adding that the ultimate aim is to bring knowledge partners “out of silos” and transfer intellectual resources and laboratory research to solve societal problems through industry collaborations and start-ups.

Ganguli said the concept of S&T city clusters is to “leverage the strength” of each academic institution in a region to connect among themselves, to promote academia-industry efforts to develop products, processes and platforms, to target burgeoning issues of the city and the region, and to engage with local authorities, state and central government agencies to solve specific issues on the ground.

Chetan Singai ... told University World News that higher education clusters would not be the same as S&T clusters as the latter focus on innovation and links with industry and government agencies, rather than higher education.

“But it should be possible for S&T clusters and higher education clusters to come together.

... acknowledged there would be some “horsetrading” between state governments and the central government over the allocation of the nine clusters.
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University World News Asia Editor Yojana Sharma contributed to this article.