Dr Picheswar Gadde, CEO, Lingaya’s University, speaks to Sheena Joseph Cherian, about the mission and vision of his institution
http://lingayasuniversity.edu.in
Tell us about the Lingaya’s University. What was the main inspiration that brought the university into being?
Lingaya’s University came into being in1998 with the simple objective of offering professional and technical education in North India. Most of the students were going from North India to South India as there was scarcity of good colleges in the North. We wanted to start an institution in Delhi, but those were the days when Delhi University was not giving affiliations. Indraprashtha (IP) came into being only in 1999. Faridabad was the nearest location to Delhi. So we decided to start there. Being a South Indian group, apart from the academics, we wanted to give more importance to the moral values and ethics. To an extent, we have been successful in the first year; we were amongst the top three colleges. In 2009, we completed ten years. As per the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) regulations, we needed ten years to become a deemed university, so we applied for I then. For that we needed to undergo very vigorous inspection. However, we got permission in January 2009.
Tell us about your views on providing job related skills to the students.
In the MNCs, where majority of students want find jobs, there is lot of competition; the MNCs give 60 percent emphasis on the academic part and 40 percent on the factors like: what is the attitude of the student, is he going to be a good team worker, how good is his body language, communication skills etc. So these are the very important things that we must also emphasise upon.
At Lingaya’s we follow a simple strategy, which says that if you manufacture a good product it will be definitely be sold in
the market, if you don’t manufacture properly it won’t be sold. We produce engineers and if they are good, they will be sold in the market otherwise they will not be sold. If we are just giving the degree for the sake of it, it means we are not doing justice.
How does Lingaya’s University distinguish itself from other technical universities?
There are certain systems that we have maintained at the Lingaya’s University. We are emphasising more on the Research and Development. We don’t emphasise on increasing the number of students or increasing the number of courses. The emphasis of the University is industry oriented. We do not emphasise on the academics; we see what the industry wants us to teach the students. Overall development of a child is also very important and this is what the Lingaya’s University emphasises on.
Tell us about your plans for building new institutes in Faridabad.
We want to build an international school in Faridabad. Haryana government has already given us the no objection certificate. The idea and concept behind this is that we want to shape the child from nursery to the Phd. level. And hopefully we will be able to complete it in the coming years.
What are your future plans?
We have our colleges in Vijayawada, we have colleges in Delhi also and we want to expand further. We wish to expand outside India also. The concept is very clear. We want to expand our wings to California. We wish to have a system that allows a student to study for three years in India and then go to USA for doing his final year. One advantage is that the student has to pay lower fees, and the other advantage is that if he does his finishing course from there, he gets visa for two years as per the policy. Same is for the Masters Program also; the student does one year here and one year there.
