MANGALORE Dec 18: National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK) has been adjudged the best technical university for 2009 by the New Delhi-based Indian Society for Technical Education (ISTE) and the Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, Bhubaneswar.

President of ISTE N.R. Shetty told presspersons here on Thursday that this was the second year that a group of experts had evaluated technical institutions, barring IITs, for the award.

Last year, the award was given to Jadavpur University.

The institutions were evaluated based on innovations, patents held and entrepreneurship of their students. “Excellence is what we are concerned with,” Dr. Shetty said.

Regretting that there was much to be achieved with regard to quality of higher education, Dr. Shetty said that only 10 per cent of students enrolled for higher education in India as against 25 per cent in China.

Efforts were being made to increase it to 15 per cent and the Union Government had increased allocation to higher education by five to six times in recent years.

Many institutions were suffering owing to lack of qualified faculty, Dr. Shetty added.

He said that the 39th ISTE Annual Convention and national conference to be held at the NITK from Friday would see lectures by distinguished personalities, 56 technical papers being presented and 65 poster presentations from engineers around the country.

The ISTE-KIIT national award would be presented to NITK during the convention.

NITK director Sandeep Sancheti said that the institution was recently given the best research partnership award by the Bangalore-based Central Power Research Institute.

Hindu