Over 4,200 former students of IIEST Shibpur have signed an online petition calling for steps to arrest the slide in the institution’s national ranking.
The petition was floated on August 2 by a former student of the institute, who now lives in California, US. The drive to sign the petition closed on August 15 and a copy of it was handed to IIEST director Parthasarathi Chakrabarti on August 12 by another former student.
The IIEST had ranked 17th in the country in the engineering category in the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) of the Union education ministry in 2018. This year it has slipped to the 40th position.
“Tathagata Roy, a former student who graduated in civil engineering, met Parthasarathi Chakrabarti on August 12. Roy handed a copy of the memorandum (petition) to Chakrabarti and shared the alumni’s disappointment over the steady fall of our alma mater in the NIRF ranking. They discussed the current situation but the director did not express any opinion on how to improve the situation,” said Swapan Saha, who graduated from the Shibpur campus in electrical engineering in 1988 and started the campaign.
The IIEST alumni and GAABESU (Global Alumni Association of Bengal Engineering and Science University) would continue offering suggestions and active contributions to address the current challenges, Saha told The Telegraph over WhatsApp.
The erstwhile Bengal Engineering and Science University (Besu) was renamed the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology by the central government in 2014. T
he global alumni association of the institution has also started gathering feedback from former students on ways to improve its standards.
Repeated calls and text messages to director Chakrabarti went unanswered. Saha said a copy of the petition was mailed to the institute’s board of governors.