Railways. PEC sign MoU to set up Kalpana Chawla Chair on geospatial technology

Ministry of Railways and PEC University of Technology, Chandigarh on 30 May 2016 signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to set up Kalpana Chawla Chair on Geospatial Technology for Indian Railways at the University.

The MoU was signed in the backdrop of 2016-17 Railway Minister’s Budget announcement.

For the purpose, the Indian Railways would provide a corpus of 10 Crore rupees to PEC University of Technology, for setting and to meet the running expenses of this chair.

Objective

• To encourage research activities in Geo-spatial Technology.

• To strengthen Indian Railways especially Railway projects where use of remote sensing data, global positioning system (GPS) and Geographical information System (GIS) is predominant.

Key highlights

• This academic chair is being instituted in fond memory of Late Kalpana Chawla an Indo–American Astronaut and Alumnus of PEC during the year 1978-82.

• To honour her contributions in Aerospace Engineering Indian Railways decided to institute the academic chair in the area of Geo-spatial Technology in her alma mater.

• Incidentally, Chawla was the first woman of Indian origin in space.

• The Chair will be headed by VK Gupta, Member Engineering, Railway Board as Chairman and Shri Manoj Arora, Director, PEC University of Technology, Chandigarh as Co - chairman.

• The Chair will function through a Chair Core Committee (CCC) having members from Railways and PEC.

Significance

• Development of the chair and its research will help Indian Railways to develop in house solutions to the problems which are often outsourced to western countries.

• It will help in developing applications to remove day to day engineering and technological problems and geospatial solutions to Indian Railways.

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