the IIITs setup under PPP

For those of you who don't know, IIIT stands for Indian Institute of Information Technology and PPP stands for Public-Private-Partnership. There are a total of 23 IIITs in India and the 18 new ones have been setup under the PPP mode, where the Central govt contributes 50% of the cost of setting up the institute, the state 35% and private/industry partners 15%.

I didn't know about you but this was news to me. I wanted to know what the industries were getting in return, what their angle was in investing in the IIITs. I wanted to know who was investing in the first place. Alas, there was no single location where I could see the private partners of each IIIT, I'd have to dig through the Wiki pages in some cases or go through the IIIT webpage. In two cases, I couldn't find the webpages for the IIITs in question.

I got bored yesterday so I took the time to look through the Wiki list of IIITs and make note of the private partners of each of the IIIT. Like I mentioned, in a few cases, I came across the information on the Wiki page itself. But, even when this was the case, I wasn't able to simply click and know more about the private partners. So, I searched for the partners and edited the Wiki to link to the partner's websites.

In other cases, I had to look up the IIIT and go through their website to know who the private partners were. In this case, I went back to the wiki page of the IIIT and updated it to reflect this information.

At the end of the day, I ended up with this list of IIIT and it's private partners - https://github.com/rahulporuri/IIIT-PPP/blob/master/README.md

I'm waiting for the Wiki page containing all IIITs to be unlocked so I can update the table and list the private partners. One stop solution. And the Wiki page is more visible, unlike my Github README.

Finally, going through the list, two things stand out. There are a lot of PSUs on the list. PSUs are government owned and run companies. That's not really private now, is it? Secondly, two private companies pop up more than once, which are TCS and Rolta Foundation.

Make of it what you will. Until next time ...

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