A large steel structure workshop with electrical transformers in various stages of construction scattered on the left, a few minutes walk from the university entrance, resembles a factory. A group of youngsters in similar uniform work with coils and cores as their instructor explains the construction, while a few others are involved in testing the assembled units.
This facility, on the campus of the Centurion University of Technology & Management (CUTM), at Jatni town, about 25 km from Bhubaneswar in Odisha, officials call the action learning and research lab; the youngsters its students and the instructors the teaching faculty.
From this unit — a National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL)-accredited lab — leave 16, 25, 63, 100, 250 and 500 KVA electrical transformers, both repaired and manufactured. Among the biggest buyers was Tata Power which placed an order worth ₹3.5 crore for 352 transformers a couple of years ago. The Gram Tarang Employability Training Services (GTET), the university’s social enterprise, also secured another order for ₹17 crore.
Like the avenue plantation pots, all the way till the classroom buildings, are many such action labs — the International Centre for Automotive Technology (ICAT)-approved electric vehicles manufacturing unit, garment manufacturing complex run by school dropouts, wood engineering, precision machining lab for aerospace products, 3D printing, among a dozen others across the campus.
About 270 km from Jatni is the university’s largest campus at Paralakhemundi, which houses the M.S Swaminathan School of Agriculture, among others, where students monitor real-time cultivation of crops. It is here the students of Telangana Minorities Residential Educational Institutions Society (TMREIS) complete their vocational hands-on training in agriculture crop production, livestock and dairy technology, commercial garment technology, medical lab technician and multi-purpose health worker courses.
“Our pedagogy is 40% classroom and 60% practice; we look at production, solving core issues and pain points — in pursuit of technology as per the changing industry standards — and not courses or placements alone,” says D. Nageswara Rao, co-founder and vice-president of the university.
“The very basis of the university is institutionalising skills through integration with higher education and industry,” he adds, citing successful partnerships with Indian Space Research Organisation, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, Dassault Systems, and others.
And industry, he affirms, has been a steadfast pillar to the university’s sustainability. “If the university’s properties are only valued at ₹250 crore, the value of the state-of-the-art equipment invested by industries is nearly three times more. It is a co-investment model: the university provides manpower and the industry collaborates on curriculum and equipment.”
An alumnus of Osmania University and hailing from Nalgonda, Mr. Nageswara Rao says the Telangana government had been keen on setting up a minority skill centre and it was in consultation. The CUTM will also be the consortium partner with Tata Technologies for the upgradation of the State’s 50 Industrial Training Institutes.
However, another persistent demand from Telangana’s present and former Ministers, educationists and bureaucrats, including those from Nalgonda, is for setting up a skill university like CUTM.
But challenges are plenty and the only acknowledgement is: “Centurion will associate and be partners but will not be able to replicate and sustain the model elsewhere.”
According to CUTM Vice-Chancellor Supriya Pattanayak, “the seeds of the CUTM were sown on the ashes of a failed Jagannath Institute of Technology and Management” in Gajapati district, in 2007, when the present founders, then professors at Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar, were invited to take management control.
A year later, the GTET was established, and in 2010, a partnership was forged with the National Skill Development Corporation.
“We are not IIT or an NIT which gets the best of students. We get an average student, and we give what makes his/her life better and that’s why there is such strong focus on skills. The average fee for a B. Tech programme is about ₹1 lakh per year, and graduate, diploma and ITI courses are even affordable,” Ms. Pattanayak says, adding that most of its campuses are still in aspirational districts and were affected by left-wing extremism. The only campus outside Odisha is in Vizianagaram in Andhra Pradesh, also an aspirational district.
The CUTM, in the years that followed, through the Central Toolroom and Training Centre, Bhubaneswar, has supplied high-precision components for the Chandrayaan Mission, has been managing the cryogenic unit of the HAL, and its faculty and trained personnel are still part of the ISRO operations.
Its signature low-Glycemic Index rice brand for diabetics, mainly the RNR-15048 seed or locally ‘Telangana Sona’, grown by tribal farmers in 1, 300 acres are directly monitored by students of agriculture.
For CUTM founder-president Mukti Kanta Mishra, as he presented the university’s case in a UNESCO paper in 2014, the skill shortage in the country was not complex but one worsened by inappropriate government policies — as several players had been treating skill development as part of one’s business model, while the aim should have been to create a ‘model business’.
“CUTM had both qualitative and quantitative success but to keep such institutions sustainable and replicable in the long run, extensive and well-planned support from the government, international agencies, and most importantly, from the industry, are required,” he writes.
The main challenges for sustaining the model, Mr. Mishra reveals, are the lack of teachers and instructors and the complexity in attaining nationally accepted certification. And CUTM, as a practice, has been creating a cadre of skilled teachers out of its engineering students, who go on to teach on all the campuses, factories and sites of skill development.
This, apart from industry readiness for a co-investment model in a different and new location, such as Telangana, founders Mr. Mishra and Mr. Rao say makes it “extremely difficult to replicate and sustain.”
But for Mr. Mishra, he is confident CUTM would emerge ‘industry 5.0 ready’ (production model focusing on interaction between humans and machines).
The university, on product manufacturing from all its units, achieved a turnover of about ₹50 crore with a major share from transformers, aerospace components, agriculture, e-vehicles and wood engineering. It aims to breach the ₹100-crore mark by the next academic year.
(The writer was at CUTM, Jatni, Odisha, at the invitation of the institute.)
