BANGALORE: One of the largest and oldest universities of India, Bangalore University, is soon to have campus placements for graduating students. The public state university is the first ever to set up a placement cell and has the city’s business professionals and educational elites to train and guide the students.

A 16-member advisory committee called Drishti is in charge of the placement division. They aim at making thousands of non-engineering PG students, especially from science and management disciplines, of the university, employable. Their primary focus is imparting skills training.

Two of the confirmed masterminds who will be taking up sessions with the students are Infosys executive vice-president Srikantan Moorthy, an alumnus himself and Dileep Ranjekar, CEO of the Azim Premji Foundation.

Moorthy, who holds a degree in electronics engineering from BU said, "At the end of the day, anything that has to do with employment is all about filling the gaps between employability and training."

Dileep Ranjekar said "I have agreed to be a part of this because when the university is showing openness one shouldn't turn it down. We should significantly invest in improving existing universities in addition to creation of new ones."

The university is yet to reveal the names of companies that will be conducting campus placements here. Federation of Karnataka Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FKCCI) president S Sampathraman, also a part of Drishti said, "We don't want the creme de la creme to go to the big companies as always.” So, medium and small scale enterprises will mostly be conducting the placement sessions.

Other names in the advisory committee are KG Umesh, head of human resources at The Himalaya Drug Company, Balaji G, chief learning officer from Fidelity India and DM Kiran, managing director and chief executive of iSol Softech.

The lead of Drishti, MK Sridhar said, “The first thing we are trying to do is to provide career guidance, pre-placement talks, written tests and other skills to final year PG students. Second, we are assessing the needs of the first year students because we have time to train them more scientifically. The advisory committee is the third, where we actually build a rapport with the industry.”

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