pune it was a trip down the memory lane for this group of citybased senior faculty members and alumni of the prestigious indian institute of technology kanpur iitk which is due to celebrate its golden jubilee in august this yearthe occasion was a gettogether by the pune chapter of iitk alumni association which boasts of a 2000strong membership engaged in diverse fields of economic activity the idea was to apprise the members of the institutes present and future plansprominent among those present were national chemical laboratory director s sivaram science toymaker arvind gupta nimkar agriculture research institute director anil rajwanshi senior professors arvind parasnis m l vaidya e c subbarao pune chapter head shailendra agarwal among others each of these members recalled their experiences in and fond memories of the institute iitks dean for resource planning and generation sanjeev k aggarwal set the ball rolling by giving an overview of the activities lined up ahead the institutes main thrust is to enrol as many alumni donors as possible irrespective of the amount of money they donate what matters is the activity we carry out through these donations he said a major part this fundraising exercise goes towards attracting and retaining quality faculty something that is otherwise difficult to achieve with the funds provided by the government we are competing with others like iitbombay delhi and institute of science bangalore he said adding retention of quality faculty was critical to forwarding the institutes programmes supporting students and social causes on the iitk campus are other priorities he added for instance scholarships extended to summer programmes and research assistance to group activity besides collaborative programmes last year we encouraged phd and mtech students to present papers for 200 journals aggarwal pointed out the iitk opportunity school for children of oncampus workers is another novel programme he said adding similarly there is a programme called the opportunity college where students and faculty are involved on a voluntary basis to impart knowledge to educated unemployed youngsters in basic mathematics english proficiency and some exposure to computersaggarwal said depending on the consent given by the probable chief guest for the function the upcoming golden jubilee function will be scheduled for august 14 or 15 we are in the process of archiving all information related to iitk and a movie will be made on the institute a commemorative stamp will also be released he added the iitk will also start an fm radio station to popularise research besides a highperformance computing centre will also be established with assistance from the department of science and technology aggarwal said