Arjun Malhotra moderated the “Knowledge Capture” session in the early morning of the last day of PanIIT 2008. This session was aimed at capturing the accomplishments of PanIIT2008.

PanIIT 2008 started with inaugural speech of Dr. Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India. He highlighted 3 key areas where IIT Alumni body needs to focus its attention:

1. Strengthen faculty and Research
2. Include current Social Issues
3. Take the current work to the masses

Anjun while summarizing the session mentioned that the major difference in PanIIT 2008 conference as compare to PanIIT 2006 is the fact that now are talking about scaling up existing projects, while earlier our focus was to initiate existing projects. This year we are having the conversation about how can PanIIT help in the scale up process. The key areas of work in which projects are going on includes Skills, Education and IIT Impact Studies.

Arjun Malhotra summaries the outcome of the conference in following 10 points:

1. We don’t tell others about the good work that we are doing. We need to create a marketing ecosystem to share knowledge between IITs and IITians
2. Regarding Empowerment of women and initiative taken to eradicate poverty, lots of discussions have happened during PanIIT 2008. Now we should start thinking of creating the policies around that.
3. There are lots of initiatives going on in the Rural Development area. We need to setup best practices to streamline the efforts.
4. Technical Education: IITs have major responsibility in this area. They already have lots of good quality content. We need to come up with ways to distribute it further.
5. Incubators: We should try to enhance the services of incubation centers in IITs. They should include services like Legal, Marketing, Business Strategy etc.
6. PanIIT can help in reviewing the existing curriculum. It has somewhat become static and is not keeping with the changes happening the industry. For example we need to include the needs of the Infrastructure Industry.
7. IUCEE is a major step in training the faculty of other institutions. 600 faculty members of other institutions are already been trained. IUCEE plan to train 80,000 faculty members in future.
8. Reach 4 India – basic skill training for rural youth in welding, house-keeping, driving, etc is a major step forward in the direction of rural transformation project taken up by PanIITs.
9. IITians for ITI – A major step forward in the direction of improving the quality and quantity of technician in India
10. In this year conference, nearly 2000 IITians have shown interest in being the volunteers for the event!!!

Last to last year we ended the conference in Mumbai, thinking of big projects that PanIIT can take. We also mutually decided that we will educate one child individually. Arjun urged everyone to look back and see whether we have done that or not and how far we have reach.
In the end Ashank Desai mentioned that every project needs a champion to drive the initiative. There are lots of projects that we have already identified. We need to create Champions. In case anyone is interested in any project be the champion first.