SAS Nagar, February 12
Following orders from the Union Ministry of Information and Technology, the Centre for Design and Advanced Computing (CDAC) has taken over the Central Electronic Design and Technology of India’s (CEDTI) unit here. As a result all short term courses and training programmes offered by the CEDTI have been discontinued, the ambitious Sector 34 multimedia centre project shelved and franchising of CEDTI courses disallowed.The taking over, which is being termed by the CEDTI management as a ‘merger’ took place this week. Although the CEDTI is putting up a brave front stating that this has been done to benefit all, sources point out that this move would lead to a loss in income of over a crore rupees to the CEDTI other than the inconvenience caused to over 1300 students who enrol for these short term courses every year.
The CDAC, a Government of India enterprise, has its head office in Pune and is known for the creation of Param super computers. The merger of the CDAC with the CEDTI is part of a larger project where all government computer training and research centres across the country have been integrated into two groups and their functions distributed.
Other than the CEDTI, SAS Nagar, the CDAC has taken over the National Centre for Software Technology, (NCST) Mumbai, and Electronic Research and Development Corporation of India, Thrivananthampuram and Noida. These centres will now be focusing on only on Master and doctorate level degrees.
For the CEDTI, however, this shift is a loss in terms of income and students. The CEDTI at present offers a single masters programme in electronic product and design in collaboration with the PEC, Chandigarh. This will continue along with the postgraduate diploma in multimedia, graphics and web designing. All other courses which include the various six months diploma courses and the DOEACC ‘O’, ‘A’ and ‘B’ level courses have been closed down. Most of the other popular short term training programmes also have been shelved.
Stating that all these courses will be available with the RCC Chandigarh as part of the DOEACC taking over the RCC, sources in the CEDTI pointed out that the “shifting of students from one centre to another is easier said than done. Where will the hostel residents go?”
Other than the training bit, CEDTI’s other major setback is the shelving of the multimedia centre project. The centre complete with an animation studio was to be set up in Sector 34. The CDAC has asked the CEDTI to implement the project from its current premises.
The CEDTI has also been disallowed to franchise its courses to its authorised training centres. The CEDTI will be losing out on the fee it received for franchising its training programmes to more than 100 such centres across Chandigarh and Punjab.
