Amrita University @ Amritapuri.org



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Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham (Amrita University)

Amritapuri Campus

"The Amrita educational institutions, as well as their faculty and students, are at the forefront in working for the nation's betterment."
-His Excellency Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam,
the President of India

From the President of India to ISRO, the India Space Research Organisation, all of India is taking notice of Amrita University. The institution is India's youngest to be conferred with university status, and the only such deemed-university to have a multi-campus, multi-discipline character at its outset.

Amrita University's five ever-growing campuses-Amritapuri, Bangalore, Coimbatore, Cochin and Mysore -currently house schools of Medicine, Business, Engineering, Journalism and Arts & Science. And all five campuses are linked via an ISRO satellite (news) , establishing Amrita University as a fully interactive, multi-disciplinary, multi-media virtual campus without geographical limitations.

The School of Business in Ettimadai was rated among the top 30 management schools in India

Due to the satellite, students at any of the Amrita campuses not only can "attend," but also interact in lectures taking place at the other campuses. Amrita University regularly holds multi-campus classes for four hours every day. During the satellite's inauguration, Dr. S. Banerjee, the director of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai, proclaimed, "This will have a catalytic effect on education in the country."

In terms of what is offered, the university is expanding at an unprecedented rate. Consider this: the School of Medicine, the School of Science & Arts and the School of Journalism were all added between 2002 and 2004. Future plans include a School of Environmental Sciences, a School of Indic Studies, School of Languages and School of Fine Arts. Within the schools, new branches are also being added constantly. Some of the most exciting of which include the School of Arts & Science's Bio-Informatics and Bio-Technology.

School of Medicine, AIMS Cochin Campus

As fast as the university is growing in scope and size, it is also growing in reputation. The School of Business was rated among the top 30 management schools in India in 2004. It was the youngest to be credited by the National Bureau of Accreditation as "very good" and the School of Engineering was one of the youngest to have all its programmes accredited as "excellent." And as the School of Medicine shares its campus with AIMS, Amma's super-specialty hospital in Cochin, upon its inauguration it immediately became one of India's top medical schools.

One problem for Indian universities is that their top professors are often lured away by high salaries to teach in Western countries. But Amma, Amrita University's chancellor, has been able to overcome this problem by reawakening Indians living abroad to the invaluable nature of their heritage. As Dr. Madhavan Nair, the chairman of ISRO, says, "We speak of 'brain drain'—people going away to other places for work—but as a single person [Amma] has provided attractive courses to bring them back and serve the people as part of their work." Several of the university's top professors and administrators have left esteemed positions in U.S. institutions to work for Amma's University.

The School of Engineering in Ettimadai was one of the youngest to have all its programmes accredited by the NBA as "excellent."

At the heart of Amrita University is the goal to not only create professionals, but also professional human beings: doctors and managers with hearts, engineers and scientists with a sense of social responsibility. As Amma says, "The goal of education should not be to create a society of people who can only speak the language of machines."

With Amma as its guiding force, Amrita University seems unstoppable, an oceanic force in modern education. Looking to the near future, one of the board of directors of Amrita University said confidently: "In few years all the major foreign universities—Harvard, Stanford, MIT, etc.—will have centres in India. Amrita University will be the only school able to compete with those universities, and it will be a model for all Indian universities to follow."

For more information please visit amrita.edu