Chandigarh, March 22,2019: Government of India under the Ministry of Human Resource Development will fund Panjab University's Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration (SPARC) for two years.
SPARC was launched last year in October and proposals were invited under this scheme till 7th December. SPARC, coordinated by IIT Kharagpur, received about 1200 proposal from all over India, including 12 from PU, Chandigarh. The VC, Prof. Rajkumar closely monitored the whole process and encouraged the younger faculty to submit collaborative proposals. The awarding of the proposals started in the first week of March after multi-layer reviewing by the experts.
Dr. Deepak Salunke, Dept. of Chemistry, received the first sanctioned project under this scheme for Rs. 44.4 Lakhs, enabling him to invite the foreign collaborators (from Flinders University, Australia) to PU, Chandigarh for the joint research on tuberculosis vaccines. The scheme allows the visiting experts to contribute to the teaching and the development of specialized learning tools for research and development in the field of join expertise at PU (with all funds from the SPARC project)
SPARC project selection process is still on as of now. Total 600 projects across India would be funded and so far about 290 have been already funded. SPARC scheme allows PU scholars to visit the collaborating institute also and the whole scheme is aimed at improving the global image of the host institutes in terms of teaching and research.