Saturday, 02 April 2022 | PNS | Roorkee
The ambassador of Norway to India, Hans Jacob Frydenlund said that the ongoing cooperation happening between Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee and Norwegian institutes is a step towards building a resilient relation. Moreover, energy, environment and renewable energy are areas where researchers from IIT Roorkee and Norwegian institutes can look to collaborate besides rock science and tunneling technology. Additionally, as per the Norwegian government mandate at least 50 per cent of the students should attend a foreign institute during their study years. Furthermore, IIT Roorkee could be a good place for students from Norway to have an international exposure, he said. The ambassador was speaking at a meeting of a delegation from the Norwegian embassy and Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI) with IIT Roorkee officials.
Addressing the meeting, the institute director AK Chaturvedi said, “Researchers from Norway and IIT Roorkee are working together on multiple projects, over a long period of time. These collaborations should be leveraged to initiate more joint activities between IIT Roorkee and Norwegian institutes. They could be in the form of student exchange programmes, internships, faculty visits etc. Opportunities for involving Norwegian and Indian industries need to be explored. Also, faculty members from the departments other than the ones already collaborating need to be made aware of this long and productive collaboration.”
There has been along-standing research collaboration between IIT Roorkee and Norwegian institutes. Researchers from IIT Roorkee and Norwegian Institutes have jointly published more than 80 research papers in the past 10 years. There are a number of ongoing projects between IIT Roorkee and Norwegian agencies, Norwegian Seismic Array (NORSAR), NGI and the University of Tromso among others. It was pointed out that there are past and ongoing collaborative research projects such as earthquake hazard and risk reduction on the Indian subcontinent; earthquake risk reduction in Himalaya with institutional cooperation between India and Norway; Indo-Norwegian institutional collaboration on earthquake engineering between NORSAR and NGI, Norway and IIT among others. Furthermore, it was stressed in the meeting that the existing collaborations between IIT Roorkee and Norwegian institutes can be leveraged to explore new areas of research partnerships.
