The Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani may soon start offering an integrated engineering-management programme, which will allow students to complete a Bachelor of Engineering (BE) and a Master of Business Administration (MBA) in five years.
V Ramgopal Rao, vice chancellor of the institute, said talks are on with the authorities at BITS School of Management (BITSoM) to let engineering graduates from the institutes complete their master’s in management within a year. The new programme could be offered in the upcoming academic year, Rao said on the sidelines of the inauguration of the Birla group-run institute’s fifth campus, near Kalyan.
The BITS Pilani institute
Began in 1964 in Pilani, the native village of the Birlas in the Marward region of Rajasthan, the institute, which was one of the six private institutes elevated as an institute of eminence, houses 80,000 students across its five campuses in Pilani, Goa, Hyderabad, Dubai and Kalyan.
The 63-acre residential campus, which was inaugurated on Saturday by Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, is built at a cost of Rs1,600 crore. It will house BITS’s management, law and design schools, which were until recently being run at a temporary facility in Powai. The other four campuses of the institute in Pilani (Rajasthan), Goa, Hyderabad and Dubai largely offer science and engineering programmes.
Roa said the institute’s foray into new domains will allow it to build a more comprehensive curriculum. “This campus will diversify BITS’s offerings and make it a multi-disciplinary university,” he said. He, however, added that offering cross-discipline programmes such as the proposed five-year BE-MBA programme will be challenging as it would mean moving students from one campus to another.
BITSoM, which was started in 2021, saw its first batch graduate last year. The school currently has an enrolment of 300 students. BITS School of Law (BITSLAW) got its first batch last year, while BITS School of Design (BITSDES) was launched only last week. The new campus will be able to accommodate as many as 5,000 students.
Need to offer multidisciplinary education
Speaking at the inauguration, Sitharaman also underscored the need to offer a multidisciplinary education. “You can have institutions and institutions where students can enroll, study and pass out and also manage to excel in their fields but to make available a very complex set of courses, but make it also market relevant, give them the ability and skills required so that they can be readily recruited and be of value to the institutions is something which is seen as a USP of BITS Pilani,” she said.
Kumar Mangalam Birla, chancellor, BITS Pilani, said: “At BITS, we stand at the precipice of blending India’s rich heritage of education with new-age knowledge systems and modern learning environments. This globally benchmarked campus is a visible marker of India’s growing intellectual prowess and a symbol of BITS Pilani’s whole-hearted embrace of multi-disciplinary education and innovation.”
