IIT Bhubaneswar Receives Financial Support for Creating a Virtual & Augmented Reality Centre

IIT Bhubaneswar created its vision document to encourage Innovation and entrepreneurial activities not only among its students and faculty members, but also in the hinterland of the Institute and the country. As a part of this vision, a Technology Incubation Centre was started two years back.  Subsequently, a Startup Centre was also opened in the Institute last year, with a space of 40,000 sqft to promote startup activities.

IIT Bhubaneswar Research and Entrepreneurship Park was incorporated on 12th Oct 2017 with the objective of fostering innovation and entrepreneurship activities.

IIT Bhubaneswar has been engaged in research activities in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality happening in the School of Electrical Sciences and School of Mechanical Sciences. The Institute is happy to announce that Smt. Susmita Bagchi and Shri Subroto Bagchi have come forward to provide a philanthropic support towards creating a Centre of Excellence in this important area and they also handed over a cheque of Rs. 2.5 crore yesterday to the Institute. IIT Bhubaneswar is thankful to them and acknowledge that the support will give an impetus to the ongoing research, and help in taking the research activity to the next level including immersive visualisation and technology incubation. This support also paved way for IIT to access matching grant opportunities from government agencies.

Upon an application from the Institute supported by the grant from the Bagchi family, the Startup Council of Odisha in its 2nd meeting held on 1st November 2017 approved to provide a matching grant of Rs. 2.5 crores to IIT Bhubaneswar under Odisha Startup Policy for technology incubation, and entrepreneurship by the side of related research activities.

The Institute also approached STPI for a grant to the centre for enhancing the scope of creating manpower, to create next generation entrepreneurs not only in this important domain, but also in related domains and development activity. STPI has committed to provide Rs. 2.5 crores to the centre which will be further enhanced in a phased manner.

This endeavour would help in creating facilities needed to foster research development activity, technology incubation, create startups, new generation entrepreneurs, initiation of academic programmes to generate human capital and contribute towards creating an eco-system in this and other related areas.