Srinagar, May 16: Vice Chancellor University of Kashmir Prof Talat Ahmad on Monday attended an important roundtable meeting under the aegis of Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute (SICI) in New Delhi.
The meeting was held with the President and Vice-Chancellor University of Ottawa and heads of various other institutions in India and Canada.
These roundtables are hosted at SICI member institutions and is an important platform to discuss the potential collaborative discourses between the KU and prestigious Canadian institutions.
Recently under the SICI’s matching and mapping programme, the Canadian SICI office has a detailed meeting with top administration of KU including VC, Dean Academic Affairs, Dean Research, KU SICI representative and some other KU scientists to identify possible long-term research collaborations in the areas of biodiversity, climate change, geology, food technology and green chemistry, among others.
The University of Kashmir is a member of SICI and Professor Manzoor A Shah, who represents the KU at SICI was last year elected to the Executive Council of SICI.
Registrar KU Dr Nisar A Mir asserted his full administrative support for deepening the productive engagement of KU with SICI to facilitate exchange of students and faculty.
KU has successfully implemented a major Indo-Canadian project sponsored by DBT-IC-IMPACTS with Prof M A Shah as Principal Investigator and quite a good number of his research scholars have so far spent 6-12 months in different Canadian universities through different types of fellowships.
Notably, the UGC has already initiated tie-ups with nearly 500 universities across UK, US and Europe to strengthen academic collaborations.
The universities in India placed under top 100 institutions in the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) or having a minimum score of 3.01 in NAAC assessment are eligible for such collaborations as per UGC guidelines.
Kashmir University figures among top 50 universities in the country (at 48th rank) in NIRF and has the NAAC score of 3.31, thus making it eligible for such tie-ups across the world.