Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman inaugurates new campus of BITS Pilani

NEW DELHI: Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman Saturday inaugurated the fifth campus of the Birla group-run engineering institute BITS Pilani, with which the national institute of eminence also diversifies into law, management and design. Located in the nearby Kalayan area of the megapolis, the Rs 1,600-crore campus spread across 60 acres will accommodate 5,000 students at full capacity, said Kumar Mangalam Birla, the group chairman and the chancellor of the institute.

Began in 1964 in Pilani, the native village of the Birlas in the Marward region of Rajasthan, the institute, which was one of the six private institutes elevated as an institute of eminence and houses 80,000 students across its five campuses in Pilani, Goa, Hyderabad, Dubai and Kalyan. The new campus moves away from its core focus of engineering to law, management and design.

The design school was started just last week while law and management schools were functional from last year from the temporary campus in Powai. Declaring the new campus open, Sitharaman said over the years, the institute has produced as many as 7,300 Fortune 500 CEOs, 300 academics of global repute and 600 civil servants. It has also produced 6,200 startups while its incubation centre has spawned 170 startups of which 30 have become unicorns.