 food processing, materials and energy will promote industrial growth in the region.
The number of Ph. Ds produced by India in higher and professional education is significantly low compared to China. I do feel that we must have a comprehensive plan to achieve substantially higher numbers of Ph Ds across all streams in the country.
In this connection, I am happy to know that about 700 Ph Ds and 450 masters students of ICT are conducting cutting-edge research on this small piece of land. ICT is an example of how things must be done.
This institute has always prioritized relevance in the design of its curricula. The syllabus to create entrepreneurs and startup companies adopted by ICT is excellent.
The first degrees awarded by the Institute of Chemical Technology were in professional disciplines. Its strong focus on relevance has ensured that the institute has kept with the times. Numerous companies were started by ICT graduates and many were started on these premises.
We are only recently talking of incubation centres. Such incubation centres were already part of ICT’s culture for over 8 decades!
The Institute of Chemical Technology is truly an egalitarian institute that respects one’s body of work and not the person. Sons and daughters of India’s richest industrial dynasties have shared benches with student from the remotest villages in India. Rich or poor, everyone has a tricky time negotiating ICT examinations in their subjects. It speaks of the inclusive character of ICT.
The culture of quality and success that permeates this hallowed campus resonates in the students who pass through these portals. Some of this institute’s most famous alumni had no business background, but they have created industrial and intellectual empires that are beyond anybody’s imagination.
Indeed, this place is entrepreneurial in its dealings, which is why I reserve my special praise for the entrepreneurs who have emerged from this institute. They have imbibed concepts and converted those into reality. They have become champions of new processes and have become engines of change. Entrepreneurs need a keen eye to understand economic, social, and scientific realities and the capacity to understand evolutionary processes in the future.
The Government of India has launched many ambitious missions – be they Swachh Bharat, Swastha Bharat, Namami Gange, Make in India, Smart Cities, Skill Development, Startup India, Standup India, Digital India, etc.
The role of your University in these missions is going to be crucial since you have been working on solving problems of societal importance – energy, environment, clean water, solar energy, affordable healthcare, food and the like. I am also aware of your institute’s efforts in cleaning the Rankala Lake in Kolhapur using CSR funds.
Waste Management is a huge problem for India and for the world as well. ICT’s research and innovation are greatly related to it. Incidentally Dr Mashelkar is the Chairman of the Expert Panel of Swachch Bharat Abhiyan and Prof Yadav is the Chairman of the Expert Panel of Waste Management Programme of DST.
India has already emerged as the youngest nation in the world. By 2020, the average age of an Indian will be 29 years, which is 8 years younger than the average age of a Chinese or an American. But demography is a double – edged weapon. It is necessary that we provide the best of education and skills to the youths to make them stakeholders and partners in the nation’s progress and development. If we fail to do so, the demographic dividend would become a demographic disaster. We need the power of science, technology and innovation to overcome the problems faced by the nation such as poverty, hunger, disease and unemployment.
As Chancellor of Universities in the State, I have one expectation from ICT. ICT should offer mentorship to some of the Universities and departments in Maharashtra to further improve their standards and transform them into Centres of State Excellence. I wish to see a regular interface between the Universities in Maharashtra and ICT.
The College of Engineering Pune had worked out mentorship arrangement with IIT, Bombay and it helped in bringing about the transformation of the College of Engineering, Pune.
I am sure, close collaboration between traditional universities with ICT will help these universities immensely.
Indian universities should aim to emulate universities in the United States and transform themselves into “magnets for creative businesses”. America’s universities have played a seminal role in fueling its economy. The Silicon Valley and the biotechnology hubs in Massachusetts and California all owe their establishment and success to university-based research programs.
With Asia’s growing contribution to the global chemical industry, India emerges as one of the focus destinations for chemical companies worldwide. With the current size of approximately $108 billion, the Indian chemical industry accounts for 3% of the global chemical industry. With current initiatives of industry & government, the Indian chemical industry could grow at 11% per annum to reach the size of $224 billion by 2017. Greater investments in manufacturing in the chemical sector are absolutely essential to ensure the growth of the Indian chemical industry.
The State is engaged in invigorating higher and technical education. It must be done with help of all stake holders. There is a need to remodel engineering education with industrial practice of 6 months to a year. Industries must pay handsomely to such interns. Industry should create faculty positions where State also gives some seed money. Such arrangements could synergize research competencies of corporations and provide universities with funds to operate strong graduate programs.
The State of Maharashtra is proud of this jewel ICT; the only of its kind. Let us all ensure that ICT remains a great institute.
To conclude, let me once again congratulate all the graduating students and wish them success in their future academic pursuits, research and profession. I assure ICT, that the State of Maharashtra will continue to support the Institute and all its programmes. Thank you.
Jai Hind, Jai Maharashtra.The 24th Ludum Dare has come and gone, and now it’s time for me to take a look back and my entry ‘And Thus She Spake’.
The source is on github, if you’d like a look.
No personal-life catastrophe’s!
I think this was my best LD48 game yet. I ended up picking and sticking with a tech stack that I knew – granted, I don’t know every piece all that well, but I was familiar with everything. I had used it all before, and was very comfortable with all the documentation there is.
Even though I was familiar with the stack, I still prepared by building small programs focusing on certain aspects I was less familiar with – like audio. LOVE (because of SDL) has an issue with audio clips bogging down the game when a lot are played. Eventually the sound cuts out all together. Because I was making little test programs, I discoverred this issue and was able to work around it before I was under the stress of the competition. Saved a couple hours of tinkering and reading.
It took me a while to figure out the kind of game I wanted to make, but more on that later. After I figured out a direction I wanted to go, instead of making a menu and adding in all the overhead right away, I started immediately on the gameplay. I started just thinking that a game like Osmos would be cool, but instead of trying to become the biggest on the map, you wanted to survive for the longest. To do so, you would need to grow and shrink. I figured that just bigger and smaller circles would work well for this – you could get bigger by eating smaller circles, and get smaller by bumping larger circles.
I quickly discovered that it was kinda boring – there was no real challenge. Once you got big enough, you’d fill the screen.
This is when I thought of the concept of a circle that always made you shrink, and grew in proportion to your shrinkage. This introduced an obstacle that the player needs to avoid, which makes the game a lot more challenging.
Once I got all the sizes, speeds, and randomization tweaked, I was basically done with the gameplay, and I felt that all the rest of my time could be spent on making the game look and sound good.
During this whole process I was able to follow my normal routines, which felt great. 
To be honest with myself, I spent an inordinate amount of time creating and tweaking the font, and I’m happy with it, overall. I concentrated on the font, but then became kind of lax on making textures for the circles, and coming up with a better game board. Overall, I spent almost no time on polishing the UI, except for the fonts.
I put each of the rules in a short quote from a fictional character (the “She” in “And Thus She Spake”), but I suspect they ended up getting ignored, as most people just typed a name and jumped in to play. I thought they were clever (maybe the low-side of clever, but at least a little clever), but in retrospect, they were just to abstract for the audience. And to be honest, I think I could have maybe drawn in the reader a little more by forcing the player to read the text first in an intro sequence.
But, easier might be to just be more straight forward with the rules. I dunno though, on the one hand I think the abstraction of the rules makes it fun to figure out, on the otherhand, they weren’t really useful.
Everything in the game is random, but it’s randomized all at once, and in one lump group. There are no stages and there is no proggression. There could still be randomization with stages/progression, and I think it would have help players learn how to play