Prof. P J Narayanan delves into India’s tech education ecosystem with ET Education

In an ET Education exclusive conversation, Sheeba Chauhan, Senior Associate, ET Education delved into India’s tech education ecosystem with Prof P J Narayanan, Director of International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. India is now the second-largest higher education system in the world— home to over 1,100 universities. This expansive landscape focuses on research, deep-tech innovation, startup culture, and much more. One such trailblazer is the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad — a pioneer in AI, computer vision, robotics, natural language processing, and more. In this ET Education exclusive conversation, we delved into “What it takes to build a deep-tech academic powerhouse” with Prof. P J Narayanan, Director of International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad

IIITH helps digitise Punjab assembly documents

Setting new standards in legislative transparency, the IIITH, Punjabi University (PU) Patiala, and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) Noida, have digitised images of Punjab assembly debates dating back to 1947 and made them available online. The institutions have also created a search engine to enhance public accessibility. Not only that, the team has also made it inclusive with audiobooks. The search engine, developed under the guidance of CV Jawahar of IIITH, and Gurpreet Lehal, consultant at PU, is an initiative of the National Language Translation Mission, Bhashini. The institutions launched the project about two years ago. “Using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), we have converted scanned PDFs into searchable PDFs,” said Krishna Tulsyan, a research engineer from IIITH, who worked as team leader on the project. “Now, using the search engine, users can search for anything — not only in English, but also in regional languages — in these PDFs without even opening them.”