IIIT Allahabad Convocation: 403 passing out students awarded degrees in online mode

Secretary, department of space and chairman, space commission K Sivan on Saturday said Gaganyaan programme, the indigenous mission that would take Indian astronauts to space, was extremely important for India as it will boost science and technology capability of the country.

Addressing the 15th convocation function of the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad (IIIT-A) and the institute’s first ever convocation to be held online on Saturday, Sivan highlighted the importance of the Indian crewed orbital spacecraft that will launch a manned mission to space, making the country fourth in line to have sent a human to space.

Speaking as the chief guest, Sivan said starting a space programme in a country like India in 1960’s was one big crazy idea. But Vikram Sarabhai foresaw the potential of space technology in transforming India. When the whole world was using space for military domination, Sarabhai thought that for a country like India with its immense size and diversity, the space technology platform is the only suitable platform for fast-track development. And the results are here for all of us to see.

“Each moment in our lives in one way or the other is connected with space technology. Today when we embark on expanding the scope of India’s space program, we are actually realising the vision of Sarabhai”, he added.

He also said that the reforms like allowing private sector, start-ups as well as academia to undertake space missions thereby bringing in innovation, technical diversity and human resource development had immense potential to improve the bottom line of space industry in India.

The top scientist said that despite the progress made over the last half a century, we still had unresolved issues of reducing poverty and hunger, providing good health services and sanitation, adequate supply of clean drinking water, providing quality education to people, etc. He called upon the students to work wholeheartedly in solving these problems.

As many as 403 students were awarded different degrees at convocation function. Besides this, the institute also awarded 23 medals to meritorious at the convocation. Ten research scholars were also conferred PhD degrees.

IIIT-A director Prof Nagabhusan shared that of the 196 students, who had opted for campus placement support, 191 had been already placed. A whopping 83 companies had visited the campus, offering average salary package of ₹22.5 lakh per annum.

Vaibhav Srivastava was awarded the Chairman’s Gold Medal for 2020 for his outstanding performance. Vaibhav Srivastava, Shivam Fialok and Simran Gill were awarded Gold, Silver and Bronze Medal respectively for BTech (IT). In BTech (ECE), Shravya Pandey was awarded gold, Srishti Agrawal the silver and Gauranshi Nili the bronze medal respectively.

Dr TCM Pillay memorial gold medal for BTech (IT) was awarded to Garima Chadha, Nobel Laureate prof Claude Cohen Tannoudji gold medal to BTech student Tanya Agarwal, Prof Dr Ing Mathias Kleiner gold medal to BTech student Niharika Shrivastava and prof Joelle Cohen Tannoudji gold medal to MTech bio-informatics student Shivani Gupta during the convocation.

All outstation guests, students and members of various bodies including the board of governors attended the event online while those present in the campus attended it physically from the IIIT-A auditorium while adhering to all social distancing norms and wearing facemasks.