Government to spend Rs 400 cr on 600 projects under SPARC

New Delhi, Aug 23: Under its scheme to forge international research partnerships, the Human Research Development (HRD) Ministry will fund 600 projects in top-ranked institutes with a total of about Rs 400 crore, according to the IIT-Kharagpur, the coordinating centre for the scheme. Announcing the scheme earlier, the HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar had said the government will be spending Rs 418 crore for these projects but had not given the break-up, nor the number of projects funded. “Funding up to Rs 50 lakh will be given to 300 projects, up to Rs 75 lakh to 200 projects and up to Rs 1 crore to 100 projects,” the office of Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur Director Partha Pratim Chakrborty told IANS.

The projects for the scheme — named “Scheme for promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration” (SPARC) — will be selected from top 100 National Institute Ranking Framework (NIRF)-ranked institutes, to collaborate with reputed foreign institutions of 25 target countries which are either in top 500 in overall education and research or top 200 in specific domains. The partnerships for each project jointly undertaken will last two years and each such group will consist of at least two international faculty, two Indian faculty and two Ph.D or Post-doctoral researchers.

The foreign faculty will be required to undertake two visits to Indian institutions totalling 2-8 months. They will also be required to teach the course topic here for up to 12-36 hours and must also engage in work on journal publications, text books, patents, etc. The target countries for collaboration, it said, will include the USA, the UK, Germany, Australia, France, Canada, Italy, China and Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore Russia, Israel, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, South Africa, South Korea, Norway, Portugal, Austria, Taiwan, Belgium, Spain, Brazil and Finland.(IANS)