Andhra Pradesh - Vijayawada   

‘No move to shift SPA from city’

VIJAYAWADA: The School of Planning and Architecture sanctioned for Vijayawada will remain in the city only and there is no move to shift it to any other place, according to the officials and academicians involved in its shaping-up.

They make this clear in the context of rumours doing the rounds that the prestigious institution sanctioned by the Union Cabinet may be shifted from Vijayawada in view of the “inability” of the district administration to provide suitable land for a permanent campus.

They say that the institution is progressing in right direction and is ready to begin its second academic year from September 1 from a temporary campus in the city. It will have a permanent campus for the next academic year when students of three batches would be in. The institution had classes for the first batch of about 95 students on the campus of Acharya Nagarjuna University, where space for classes and hostels was found to be inadequate.

Representatives of the SPA, New Delhi, the mentoring institution for the new one, assert that they are close to finalising a building on Pinnamaneni Polyclinic Road, which was earlier used by a corporate college, for running the new institution for the next 12 months with about 200 students of two batches. “But, even this building will prove to be grossly inadequate when we will have the third batch of another 105 students for 2010-11 academic year,” points out H.D. Chhaya, Professor-in-charge of the SPA, Vijayawada.

The institution, he points out, is witnessing important developments taking place on the academic front, the foremost of which is the appointment of S.K. Khanna, a former Chairman of the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) as the chairman of its governing council.

The constitution of a governing council is expected to help speed up the decision-making. This will now be followed by the appointment of a full-time director and a permanent faculty, for which notifications were already issued, well before the institution reopens for the new academic year.

Though all those involved in the institution’s development agree that the finalisation of a site for construction of a permanent campus must be done at the earliest, if the campus needs to be readied for next academic year, consensus seems to elude on the exact location.

While the State government and the district administration are still in favour of locating the institution at Veerapanenigudem, representatives of the SPA, New Delhi are not so much in favour of moving away from the city on the grounds that architecture and planning could be studied and practised only in urban areas. They still prefer to make optimum use of the 10-acre site available on the premises of Government Polytechnic College, to begin with.

AP State Council of Higher Education (APSCHE) Chairman K.C. Reddy says though he is not fully in agreement with the view that architecture institution could not be located away from the city, instructions have been issued to the district administration to identify alternative locations. “A team will visit this month to take a final decision on the location of the permanent campus,” he reveals.

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