IIHS is a national education institution committed to the equitable, sustainable and efficient transformation of Indian settlements.
INDIA’S URBANISATION CHALLENGES India’s urban population is expected to increase from a little under 300 million in 2001 to about 800 million by the middle of the 21st Century, an increase of an astonishing 500 million people. At this point, urban India will account for more than half of the country’s population. India will thus make a historic transition from a largely rural and agrarian society to one that is predominantly urban. However it will be more than just an economic transition: it will result in the transformation of Indian society, its culture, its politics and without a doubt, the country’s natural and built environment. At the same time, it will place an enormous strain on both existing urban centres and the many new ones that will come into existence. Historically urban settlements have been the cradles of civilisation and culture, providing environments in which a multitude of intellectual, economic and social activities have flourished. For these diverse pursuits to thrive in the India of the 21st century, we need settlements that work efficiently, are sustainable and provide to all its citizens access to jobs, services and security along with the social and cultural space needed for full human development. The future of India will hinge on these urbanisation challenges being handled with wisdom and alacrity to create an equitable, sustainable, secure and prosperous nation. Failure to do so will be catastrophic for India and a deep crisis for the rest of the world. A NEW CENTRE OF LEARNING: IIHS UNIVERSITY Ironically, the fundamental constraint in the orderly growth and transformation of urban India is neither capital nor, perhaps, technology. The chief impediment is the availability of sufficient numbers of well educated professionals committed to the common good who can play the role of change-makers and entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, India’s higher education system has no professional programme built around interdisciplinary skills or of the scale to educate enough learners for the satisfactory planning, development and management of India’s urban settlements. The Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), a not-for-profit company, was incorporated to address this multi-dimensional and interdisciplinary challenge so that the country can respond with wise and timely solutions. IIHS aims to establish India’s first privately funded and managed National University for Research and Innovation focussed on the challenges and opportunities of urbanisation in all its aspects. The University is intended to be a globally ranked institution. The IIHS University will host an integrated programme of quality campus-based education and research, practical training for working professionals, distance and blended learning, as well as a whole array of practice-based advisory services. The University will have a strong interdisciplinary orientation, bringing together theory and praxis, grounded in the South Asian and the contemporary global context.
The Masters and Undergraduate programmes of the University will provide a deep understanding of a wide range of topics including the economic drivers of urbanisation, urban planning, the physical infrastructure, transportation systems, the social infrastructure and social justice, land and housing, public safety and disaster management, the environment and sustainability and law and urban governance. The PhD programme will educate a new generation of researchers and academics who will enable India and South Asia’s urban transformation to get off the ground. GLOBAL PARTNERS IIHS has drawn upon the best available international talent and a global network of knowledge partners to develop its programmes and curricula. These include leading universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University College, London (UCL), University of Cape Town’s African Centre for Cities (ACC), Brazil’s Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC), Yale University’s South Asian Studies Council; renowned international praxis partners like ARUP and IDEO; various United Nations agencies (UNDP, UNEP, UNISDR) and international knowledge networks like the World Bank’s Urbanization Knowledge Partnership (UKP) and the EU-funded Urban Knowledge Network Asia (UKNA). The India Urban Conference (IUC 2011) co-organised by IIHS and Yale was India’s largest urban policy and praxis conference, that brought together top policymakers, practitioners, activists and researchers from cities and states across the country to Mysore and Delhi. The IIHS’ Masters in Urban Practice (MUP) curriculum was facilitated by a grant of $ 1 million from the Rockefeller Foundation. This initiative has provided inspiration to interdisciplinary endeavours in other geographies. FACULTY AND PRACTITIONERS We expect a 100-strong, globally recruited faculty to deliver interdisciplinary education to an initial pool of about 1,200 domestic and international undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students in Bangalore before scaling to other campuses. Another group of professionals will reach out to a much larger number of distance-learners and institutions engaged in urban issues who wish to avail to training and advisory services. Apart from the close interaction of these two faculty pools, the space between theory and practice will be further bridged by drawing on leading practitioners and academics from around the world. The search for faculty, who will be remunerated bearing in mind national and international levels of compensation, has met with considerable enthusiasm in India and abroad - with faculty relocating within the country, as well as from the United States, Europe and southern Africa. An organisation design plan to support this process was prepared by Ernst & Young.
PROGRAMMES The IIHS Academic Programme will consist of globally benchmarked Bachelors, Masters and Doctoral Degrees in Urban Practice based on a wide set of disciplines and practice areas central to India’s urban transformation. The Master’s in Urban Practice (MUP) programme will be a two year interdisciplinary course – for which the core, adjunct and visiting faculty are in place. The Bachelor’s in Urban Practice (BUP) programme will be a four year course, after the +2 level of schooling. The Integrated Masters in Urban Practice (IMUP) programme will be a one year course for exceptional candidates of the BUP programme. The PhD and applied research programme will help create a new generation of interdisciplinary researchers and a corpus of relevant India-centric knowledge. In addition, a distance, e-learning and mobile-learning programme will provide multiple learning opportunities for a very significant number of persons in regional languages as well as English. A special mention needs to be made of IIHS deep commitment to the process of social transformation in India by providing educational opportunities to deserving learners irrespective of economic and social status, gender, age or disability. A pan-national search process, special bridge programmes and scholarships will help draw in hitherto socially and economically excluded learners. Bank financing to help support these processes is in place, with which the scholarship programme has made a modest start. Lateral entry from multiple disciplinary streams will be facilitated via special transition programmes. Based on the experience of running two years of short courses, we are confident that the degree programmes will be of considerable interest to a variety of students including those thinking of pursuing studies in science, engineering, medicine, the humanities, social sciences, law and commerce. The Programme for Working Professionals (PWP) caters to the training and development needs of public, private and civil society institutions. It has run interdisciplinary and specialised short courses for over 200 participants since 2011 on a number of contemporary urban themes including Geographical Information Systems, Integrated Urban Disaster Risk Reduction, Re-Imagining the ‘World-Class’ City, Sustainable Urban Futures, Social Venture Design and Environmental Sustainability. The recently launched Programme for Working Professionals in Urban Development (PWP-UD) is India’s first interdisciplinary, practice based, full-time, eight-month certificate programme for early and mid-career working professionals who want to augment their competencies and professional worth; add significant value to or change their career tracks. The PWP-UD 2012-13 runs from October 2012 to June 2013 and has attracted quality professionals from the private sector (e.g. Tata Consultancy Services); public enterprises (e.g. HUDCO), trade unions and NGOs (e.g. SEWA) and a range of practicing self-employed professionals from a wide range of disciplines from management, engineering and architecture, to finance, law and economics.
The IIHS Practice Programme provides a wide range of advisory and consulting services to the government and private sectors, international organisations and NGOs. These services are intended to be of a scale and complexity not hitherto seen and in time are expected to generate an operating surplus that will be utilised to cross-subsidise the Academic & Research Programme with which they will be closely integrated to facilitate practice-based learning and bringing applied research into action. EMPLOYMENT POTENTIAL The employment opportunities for the change managers and specialists who graduate from the IIHS University lie in organisations such as: • Public Sector Enterprises: municipalities and urban local bodies, state and national governments, regulators, public utilities and public enterprises; • Private Sector Enterprises: housing, construction, infrastructure, utility, real estate, finance and advisory services, consultancies; • Civil Society Organisations: organisations working on community issues, mobilising collective action, enabling the common good and social inclusion; • Universities and Knowledge Enterprises: institutions building South Asia-centric and globally relevant knowledge on human settlements. IIHS has started to develop close working relationships with these employer organisations via its training and outreach programmes. Domestic and international participants in IIHS courses have come from the central and state governments; the private sector, civil society, UN and international agencies, independent working professionals, graduate and advanced graduate students and faculty members of academic and research institutions. The National Student Challenge (NSC 2012) IIHS’s unique urban innovation implementation challenge drew applications from over 500 interdisciplinary student teams from universities, colleges and institutions in 75 towns and cities across India. The leading three teams will work with IIHS professionals and mentors to test and implement solutions in their host cities. LOCATION AND CAMPUS The IIHS currently works from its centrally located Bangalore City campus in a 21,000 square feet state-of-the-art facility, from where it runs the bulk of its academic and research, practice and training programmes. It has centrally located offices in Mumbai and Delhi from where advisory, research and training programmes for north India are run.
The main IIHS campus will be established on a 54 acre plot at Kengeri in the south-west of Bangalore, not far from Bangalore University, and well connected to the city centre. It will have an initial built-up area of 500, 000 square feet, inclusive of student and faculty housing. Work on the planning of the campus has begun. It is expected to set standards for efficient, economic and sustainable design, operations and maintenance. It will aggregate and demonstrate the talents of India’s best designers, construction agencies and artisans. IIHS is expected to evolve into a network of institutions in various locations, reaching out across South Asia, leveraging on local knowledge and competence and linking them to global best practices. IMPLEMENTATION Discussions are at an advanced stage with the Government of India on the regulatory framework under which the IIHS University will be incorporated under the Universities for Research and Innovation Bill (2012). Work on a detailed project report is at an advanced stage. This includes a vision and mission statement, the statutory and legal framework, key programme elements, curriculum, faculty hire and academic partnering, assessment of student numbers and employment opportunities, institutional design, managerial and administrative staffing, campus design, project costs, project economics and funding requirements. It is currently expected that the IIHS Master’s and PhD programmes will commence in 2013 and the Bachelor’s programme in 2015. The introduction of these degree courses has been preceded by three-years of intense work on long and short-term nterdisciplinary and specialised programmes for working professionals; an increasingly visible research programme and the IIHS practice programme that delivers services to national, state and municipal government, international agencies, the private sector and civil society organisations. FUNDING The IIHS University will be a not-for-profit, privately funded entity and will have a best-in-class governance structure. The funds currently sought to be raised are of the order of ` 400 Crores (approximately US $ 80 million) over a quarter of which has currently been committed. Donors will enjoy naming rights to five interdisciplinary schools that will cover the academic spectrum, a number of Chairs belonging to various academic disciplines, a well-equipped and state-of-the-art library and a multi-purpose 500 seat auditorium. Full endowments have been secured for the School of Environment and Sustainability and the School of Human Development-the first interdisciplinary school of its kind in the world.
In addition, donors will enjoy special access to the facilities of the University, its faculty, its students and its programmes. IIHS looks forward to an enduring and successful partnership with its key donors. PROMOTER GROUP The Indian Institute for Human Settlements, the promoter of the IIHS University, is a Section 25 not-for-profit company under the Indian Companies Act. It has been brought into existence, nurtured and led by a group of eminent Indians from several walks of life. This group currently consists of • Aromar Revi
• Nasser Munjee
• Bansi Mehta
• Pradeep Saxena
• Chandrashekhar B. Bhave
• Rahul Mehrotra
• Cyrus Guzder
• Rakesh Mohan
• Deepak Parekh
• Renana Jhabvala
• Deepak Satwalekar
• Shirish B. Patel
• Jamshyd Godrej
• Vijay L. Kelkar
• Kishore V. Mariwala
• Xerxes Desai
• Nandan Nilekani (For more information, please see annex) CONTACT: Chandrashekhar B. Bhave Executive Chairperson Indian Institute for Human Settlements cbbhave@iihs.co.in Aromar Revi Director Indian Institute for Human Settlements arevi@iihs.co.in
IIHS City Campus, No. 197/36, 2nd Main Road, Sadashiva Nagar, Bangalore 560 080, India T +91 80 6760 6666 Tharangavana, D/5, 12th Cross, Rajamahal Vilas Extension, Bangalore 560 080, India T +91 80 4113 7705 803 & 808, Surya Kiran, 19 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110 001, India T +91 11 4360 2798 | F +91 11 2332 0477 November 2012 www.iihs.co.in | info@iihs.co.in