 First of all, let me tell you the background of this discussion. Originally, when we started and conducted IST, so IST has some norm for conducting IST workshops. As per those norms, for a two-week program for 35 teachers, their approved budget is some 1 lakh 5000 rupees for a two-week program. And when I discussed this with the co-ordinators like you people last time, they all said that that budget is inadequate. In that 1 lakh 25000 to conduct the program, pay the honorarium to co-ordinators and support staff and to take care of stay, food and travel of all the participating teachers is impossible. One of the problems was that the participating teachers could come from any part of the country and therefore expenditure on their travel was a significant part. But even otherwise, the budget was not adequate. So what we did is, we had a very elaborate discussion with the co-ordinators. I am sort of telling you the gist of it. The gist was, firstly we recognized that independent of the number of participants, there shall be some fixed cost. After all, if there are even five participants someplace, the preparation that you will have to do and to execute the workshop, you will need one coordinator, you will need a couple of teaching assistants, you will need some technical staff. Now this is independent of the number of participants. So we decided that we will define a budget which has a fixed portion and a variable portion. And that is what this sheet shows. So in the fix, this was of course, that thing was a 10 day workshop. Now this will be a 15 day workshop, we did not… So let me put it this way. There are actually 10 working days in a two week workshop, Monday through Friday if you include. We would ordinarily include also part of Saturday or part of Sunday in case some teachers want to work in the labs and things like that. But that is left to the initiative of the participants. Usually what we have noticed is that the enthusiasm level of participating teachers on an average is not very high. In every group you will get two or three teachers who will be more enthusiastic than you. They will really participate very hard and in some places the number could be larger. Similarly, there will be two or three teachers who are coming there just for the namesake. They are physically present but their mind is not there. That happens with our students also. So we cannot blame them. But on an average the general enthusiasm level is low and that is one of the objectives of this workshop is to fire them with the kind of ethos that prevails in your institutions. It is very, very important that they take away not only the technical knowledge but the ethos of your place. And that is the reason why I always want a good number of people from your institute to be participating in this interview. Because then when they interact with individuals that is where they learn to get the fire. So what we said is that you should take ten working days on which the people will have to sort of participate and engage. We have said we shall have one coordinator. We shall have teaching assistants which we said will be five in number. Then we said we shall have some technical assistant. We had a V-SAT coordinator. The objective is this. You know, those institutions are going to use EJU-SAT. Now EJU-SAT facility is controlled by somebody else not necessarily by our department. And there is a technical coordinator and there is an assistant or something like that. But usually they are not considered for payment of any honorarium because that is part of their duty. In actual practice you will agree that this does not work. If they see that teachers participating in the workshop are being paid some honorarium they will also expect some honorarium. So that is why we had put this as 3000 rupees. So we have said coordinators. There could be some one technical person or two technical person. I will give you a simple thing. Suppose our session starts from 9 o'clock in the morning and let's say their official time is 10 to 5. Now during the workshop they have to come at not 9 but even at 8.30 and start the activity. Why should they be so enthusiastic to do that? So they will be enthusiastic if we tell them that look we will recognize your contribution and we will as a token will pay you an honorarium. There will be a greater chance of their being enthusiastic. That is the reason we had calculated all of this. So this part you can see is for 10 operational days. Of course the coordinator has to slog out. The coordinator will have to work early or later and whatever. So that's okay. But we presume that coordinators are all self-driven people and the 6000 rupees is a notional honorarium. I had a big problem convincing IST that 6000 rupees should be paid to a coordinator. They have no such notion. I don't understand. They have I think budgets approved in some Babadam's time and they are just continuing with that. But that's okay. That's their life. Now the second thing we said is that there could be miscellaneous expenditure at each remote center which cannot be tacked to some specific expenditure. It could depend upon the situation that you have. Similarly there could be occasions when suddenly some money has to be spent and people should have budget. Just like we are autonomous, not only institutions, individual faculty members ought to have autonomy to execute an activity. Effectively then the miscellaneous expenses and contingency you can regard as 20,000 rupees which is a total fund available at disposal with the coordinator. So each one of you can decide. If something has to be spent, if 300 rupees have to be paid to someone to get something quickly, you should go ahead and do that. You should not feel constrained because otherwise you will be administered by the institute rules and if there is no budget head, the institute may find it problematic to permit you to spend money. So this is the budget we have kept. If you don't use it, of course you save the money, the national mission benefits that money can be used to support some more teachers elsewhere. But if you need to spend, please go ahead and spend. So this is the buffer that we have decided on and I think many institutions did use this properly and they said they are happy with this. They could quickly do something that they wanted. So you will have to spend some money depending upon how you handle this. This institute overhead is a lump sum of 10,000 rupees which we said should be given to the institute and to be used in whichever manner the institute feels. So typically the head of the institution can use this money in whichever way. They can either take it into their own books of account or the head of the institution in consultation with the coordinator may decide to use this for whatever purpose. We are saying this is an institute overhead which we recognize as part of the workshop and we will pay that. So this is the total amount of fixed cost for a workshop we said 60,000 rupees and even if there is one participant, 60,000 rupees will have to be spent. Now this was the toughest part to convince what you call ISD. So what we did is we said alright let's have an MOU where we will conduct these workshops on your behalf and we will not ask you for any money. We will arrange from funds from somewhere else. The moment we said we don't want money from you, ISD was very liberal. They said you do whatever you want to, not any issue. So then that is where we made proposals to MHRD saying please fund us and accordingly we have a funding approval for the pilot and funding approval for this should come anytime now. So this is the fixed part. Now in the variable component we had discussions what we found out is depending upon the place and the cost of the place bigger cities will be costlier, smaller cities will be cheaper. So the estimate was that food per day could vary between 100 rupees to 250 rupees. Now we don't know what the food cost is. Actual cost will depend upon the actual cost that you will incur. We just arbitrarily decided to take an arithmetic average and calculated based on that arithmetic average. So for 15 plus 1 days because the total working days may be 10. The actual days will be 13 or something. But we have calculated this for 15 days just to be on the safer side. So this is the kind of budgeting that we are doing. So we said this much will be the money spent on food. Again stay depending upon the hostel accommodation and other things that you have the accommodation cost may vary. The only request is since it is part of a national mission project your institution should charge people stay at the official rate that you charge for official work because this is a national MSR mission project. It's not any private enterprise or something. It's a government activity. And that most of the issued directors will agree if there is a problem I can have the joint secretary write a letter or something but that would not be necessary. If necessary I will write a letter requesting the director to make facilities available at the normal rates which are charged for officials like you invite somebody as external examiner. So whatever be the charges some similar charges should. We believe this should be national charges yet we have taken a variable between 100 to 175 again divided by 2 and calculated an approximate cost. Travel reimbursement we said we will limit to 1000 rupees. So even if a faculty member comes from a very long distance we will say you or your institution will have to bear the travel cost. Suppose there are local colleges where people are staying in their own house. They don't need accommodation from you. Consequently you don't have to provide them accommodation and you don't have to give them dinner. You have to give them only lunch and tea and everything. But they will be spending money for coming to your place and going back. Let's say they come by auto rickshaw and go back by auto rickshaw. Comfortable. There will be some cost that they will incur. What we are saying is even to such people you can reimburse up to 1000 rupees as travel expenses. The travel expenses incurred for participating in the workshop is what we mean by this. The limit on 1000 rupees is to ensure that people do not unnecessarily travel from Jammu to Trivandrum to attend a workshop. Let me also tell you last time because we did not have many remote centers in North India there were people from Uttar Pradesh and there were one person from Srinagar there were some people from Uttarakhand and there were some people from Aligarh and they came all the way to Amdabad and Surat and to Indore to attend this workshop. And they were warned by the central coordinators that look we will not be able to reimburse you more than 1000 rupees they said we don't care, we will spend from our own pocket. So such was the level of enthusiasm and therefore people will not find this sort of amish. This is okay. This is a variation from IST. IST says you have to give money for all travel but we are told IST that since we are funding ourselves we will go by these rules. So is that okay? You feel that this is what we have run our workshop. The methodology of usage is this is the total amount A plus B is about 240,000 rupees. The way we operate this is as follows initially after some enrollment is known that there is non-trivial enrollment at a center IIT Bombay will transfer I think 50% of the total amount immediately to you. And the day and when do we transfer the remaining during the workshop. Now for that we will require specific information because we are able to transfer money to your accounts directly. In fact we will not like any check or draft or any such thing here. IIT Bombay can transfer money directly into your account. Depending upon the procedure at your end you can either open an account or if the issue says in this account number you can deposit but they will keep the account separately. We have no issues. You can follow your own procedure. Yeah, most places they open any account. Now we expect that you maintain the accounts exactly as you would diligently for any other sponsored project. So you should have all bills. You should have everything, everything with you. However, you need not submit all of them but you have to submit an audited accounts report. You can get any local auditor who can go through all your bills etc etc and say so much money was spent on this. Something like a utilization certificate. But MHRD we are required to give a utilization certificate. Our audit however says because our auditor gives a utilization certificate based on the internal audit they conduct on our accounts. Since the money is being spent by your institution they can't audit your accounts. So what finally we have worked out between our dean and ourselves because this is a very new situation. So what the dean's office said is that look we want auditing of the accounts. So whether it is done at your place or at our place we will consider it equal. So as long as there is a charter account and certificate that your accounts have been audited and that audited account certificate only you send to us that is the end of the matter. It could also be the chief accounts officer of your own institution. It need not be a chartered account. That's right. That document has to be formally there because our auditors will use that certification. So usually with government institutions there is absolutely no problem. As long as the chief accounts officer or deputy or finance or whosoever it is he signs that he has seen these accounts and this is the expenditure that is incurred. But the coordinators are expected to first collect bills, vouchers, whatever. Wherever there is no formal receipt available for example a participant comes and claims that I have spent let's say 25 rupees per day on auto rickshaw one way and auto rickshaw another way you get a letter from that participant. That is good enough. Basically participant is also a teacher. So when a teacher certifies that I have spent this money for this purpose that is perfectly acceptable. So we have tried to simplify the process as much as is possible and we will to repeat we will send half the money immediately by wire transfer and the remaining half we would try to do it last time we did it during the workshop I think. But now that we have enough time we can even do it just two days before the workshop. Basically you will not be short of money as far as these budgets are. So do you think this process is okay? Any suggestions or observations? No. We had a problem in the pilot our office first insisted all vouchers must be submitted and I think two centers did that that volume was so much then I went and met the dean I said do you specialize in reading meaningless vouchers because we are going to run this from 30 centers and I am going to do this 12 times in next two years then he understood. Further I asked him if you are asking him for the vouchers you have no business asking him for account certificate because then it is your problem auditing is to be done by you then then they made a special rule for FATA which says that a certificate from the institution either from the chief accounts officer or from a charter accountant that the expenditure has been audited all that we require is somebody certifies that the expenditure has been audited and that one page certificate is good enough now whatever is the amount stated there that amount could be different from the total amount that we have paid to you so there would be maybe an excess amount that has been given to you or a shorter amount and in either case there will be a single transaction between the two institutions if there is any excess money you will refund it to the project and if there is an excess expenditure within the budgets of course the issue will for example let us say we have done this calculation a variable thing of 35 people 30 people we ordinarily expect 35 people our budgets actually are for 35 people so you can add 5 more people and this will extend suppose you have 42 people at one place then obviously there will be excess expenditure suppose there are 24 people only at one place suppose there are only 10 people at one place now we had a lot of internal debate between ministry and us is it worthwhile to run this workshop for only 10 participants and we had different opinions the finance people from the ministry said it is not cost effective but I took a stand that even if 10 of our teacher colleagues benefit it is worthwhile to run this program because 10 teachers would mean 300 or 400 students and therefore it is worth it do you agree with this philosophy at least so that is how we will go by we would like to maximize the number of participants yes minimum number of participants which can well we discussed it around 10 now what should be the exact minimum number it is a call we have to take okay and let me tell you there is no steadfast rule by the way all this procedure this procedure is now steadfast in the sense that it has become a rule because we have practiced it but each one of these rules is modifiable either by mutual discussion or by me alone I hold that privilege every project investigator in IIT or in NIT holds that privilege to spend money as per this so to answer your question let me ask you how much you will define as minimum I give the argument about 10 suppose you had 9 does it change the argument in any way suppose you have 8 suppose you have 7 suppose you have 5 now suppose you have only 2 then perhaps I should worry that for training 2 people you have 1 coordinator 2 teaching assistants 3 technical assistants is it worthwhile then so it is not in terms of money but in terms of efforts that you are spending your institute is spent it should not happen that very few are taught by very many people now what is reasonable is very difficult to say can we arrive at some consensus as to what should be the minimal number good one to one correspondence but again I will say you have to take a call personally I will be very disappointed if we run a center with less than 35 people because for the first time last time when we ran we had 980 enrollments we had to curtail those enrollments because we could not run at more than 22 centers we finally ran with about 650 or how many teachers 637 teachers at 22 remote centers there were some remote centers which said we can do double the capacity so Anna University and Sona college somebody is there from Sona college no these two these two centers said we have excellent lab infrastructure and we can accommodate 60 teachers so 60 teachers in a single lecture hall is okay but what about labs so they told us that they have labs and they will have technical assistance so we made a special provision which I must tell you also we said that if you can take 60 or more participants then we will double this expenditure barring of course the institute overhead and some contingency but we said we should have two coordinators because after all ultimately we are dealing with people you should have 10 teaching assistants et cetera et cetera and we said instead of 60,000 whatever is it 60,000 is it I can yes it is 60,000 so it was not 120,000 but it was almost like 100,000 or something so that's again an ad hoc decision which we took at two centers the enrollment exceeded 30 students were willing to run actually Anna University enrollment went to 90 students and the professor said sir doesn't matter we will handle 90 but I got scared so I said we will transfer 30 people to some other place so the ambition here is to get as many teachers to participate as you can last time there was also a problem there was a significant delay in circulating the information about the workshop because the pilot money itself was not released for a long time actually I was on a tender hook for a period for which I was spending money effectively from my own pocket from my consultancy project and thing like that but fortunately the funds came and there was no issue now this time the brochures that we mentioned she tells me that about 300 brochures will be printed by afternoon so each one of you will be carrying back at least 10 of those brochures yourself objective just look at them ensure that they are okay and if you want you can actually hand deliver it to your friends in your neighboring colleges or send it by post for some people who may take more time to decide the other brochures should be reaching you before within 5 days similarly we will make the enrollment site up within 5 days which means that the enrollment registration can begin very quickly this is the time when teachers are still there in the colleges so if you can reach the heads of the departments besides we shall be sending two brochures with a letter to each of the 4000, 3500 engineering colleges whose addresses we have but our letters necessarily go to the principal or director and what we have seen is they remain on the table of the director for quite some time the advantage with you is possibly in touch with the comparison department professors and heads of the neighboring colleges so additionally if you send these brochures to those places because the name of your center is there and you say you want to enroll go to this website enroll and I think by end of May itself we will know what is the status because the last dates we are mentioning for enrollment is I think 4th June and for finding we have two stages intention to join but whether the person is registered or not we will decide now that decision we would like to take in consultation with the center coordinator so they will mention which center they want to go to and I am suggesting that they should mention two optional centers first choice and second choice because in case the first choice is full which is the next center they would like to go to so with that once on 4th June once we have the total this thing we will send the you will be visible to you as well because the list of enrolled candidates including their institutions etc etc is on the web it is open to everybody but we will make specific list per center and we will tell you we would like you to go through those names in case you find something amaze and I will tell you where you may find something amaze the lady mentioned about a teacher who is not on roles but that is because the person has been thrown out after one semester and he is not yet joined in the next semester suppose there is a person who has never been a teacher who just claims to be from some college but you know for sure that this fellow is a fraud now you should be able to advise us he might have enrolled don't register suppose there is a teacher who is teaching programming in a science college which is not an engineering college college professional college course you may use your description that you believe that this teacher and those students will benefit so you recommend we will take that is the approach that we want to follow buy some internet bandwidth or which money there is no money for v-set or v-set coordinator is there so we don't have to v-set can we use that money as a well this is a very small amount of money v-set coordinators this is actually to be an honorarium to v-set wherever there is a v-set there is a infrastructure provision in the institute so somebody has been appointed regularly to take care of that v-set center so what we said is this is some additional honorarium to be paid to him but if you don't have v-set so what you should do then you should say internet coordinator whatever because you will be using some bandwidth you will be using either v-set or n-k-n so those institutions which are likely to use n-k-n for example can consider this to be the n-k-n coordinator's honorarium which is not the head of n-k-n but the technical staff you know who will ensure that like you have seen our people all the network in this room by the way was not set up by computer center it was set up by our own people jointly with computer center so when they did that last time we paid them a little bit of extra honorarium so this is meant for that you are right so we will say don't say v-set coordinator you say network coordinator's whichever name any other observation for teaching assistants most welcome most welcome that is the reason why we are calling them teaching assistants they need not be staff members as a matter of fact I would love to see postgraduate students or even postgraduate students being used the objective should be that they should also learn something but they should be meaningful they should be doing that job and in fact I want participating teachers to learn that we don't feel there is anything wrong if I have to learn from a student we will communicate that ethos to our participating teachers very good no problem and you can pay them the same honorarium or whatever it is entirely up to you and if you ask me sometimes some of our M.Tech students or Ph.D. students would be more motivated than technical assistants to participate in it it all depends actually I will tell you it is the individuals who matter as long as you choose the right individual and all the technical staff who is dedicated may be far better than a flamboyant student who will come today but not come tomorrow you choose the people that is why the entire liberty central coordinator in a remote center in any institution is exactly what I consider my replica in that place and whatever freedom I have I want each one of you to enjoy the same freedom at your place if you have any problem this is some experience I want to share regarding the clicker last time we had only the last stage we realized that the clickers won't work if there is a proxy in your network the clickers will work only without a proxy so we had to have some contingency expenditure buy an internet access and through a Tata photon we could do it so those sort of integrity instructions which you need to supply to the coordinators you should do this very good point because last time we used clickers as just experimental thing and it did not work properly as he rightly said people had to buy immediately some access and so on but this time it will not be so first of all at our end we are getting a two Mbps bandwidth for this project from our computer center which will be outside the proxy and that will be set up in about 15 days time that is why the trials with that AVU etc we shall have only after about 15 days not immediate so we can start from 20th May and between the week of 20th May to 30th May we can do one or two exercises similarly the clicker protocol now has been grossly simplified and at your end you still need a connection to FTP server but our FTP server will be outside the proxy so that should not be a problem and yes in case you have to incur any expenditure of buying some equipment for 2000 rupees equipment for 5000 rupees or something please go ahead and do that that is the purpose of objective of this contingency and let me tell you this particular institute let's say your contingency expenditure is 30,000 rupees instead of 10,000 rupees ordinarily as per laws of the land if you exceed that is your problem as per laws of this workshop no issue but just justify why you have to spend that extra money that you needed to do this as long as it is related to your ability to execute the project I don't think of my dean R and D will have any problem if I recommend that out of these 30 institutions institutions had to spend 1500 rupees extra on this I don't think there should be any problem so but don't if all 30 institutions start doing it then my dean will have some very strong word with me essentially along with any freedom comes also responsibility and accountability so as long as you exercise those absolutely no issue like confirm by visat coordinator or network coordinator generally what we have in charge who is looking after the visat center yes and then we have a technical assistant who is helping so by visat corner do we mean the professor in charge or the technical we generally mean the technical coordinators who are expected to be present for some time every day to ensure that there is no network breakage and so on but if you want to break it up between the two we have no issue generally the professor in charge invariably is the one who is involved in the initial conceptualization in laying out the plan in ensuring all the equipment is bought and it is established after which the running around is done by the technical so we had the coordinator means we had this the technical stuff do you think that it will be useful if we rename that item here as yes so we say so instead of saying network coordinators can we say network technical support exactly so our network assistant whatever you want to say technical assistant network Anirban as usual has the last laugh so take this name technical assistant network I think that is the word that we use sorry no we want like to distinguish say I will tell you teaching assistants are the people who run my labs and tutorials these technical assistants are people who will help you set up open to ensure that you are held up works or moodle works or whatever so these are the people who are sort of hardware software people to manage the lab whereas the network is a generally a third person so I would say teaching assistant technical assistants and we will say technical assistant network I think that phrase is ok distinguishes but good point thanks for pointing this out yeah basically our colleague professors who only exercise the right of signing somewhere should not be entitled for honouring this honouring is meant for people who actually do work whosoever it is that professor is so enthusiastic and personally comes and sits there absolutely no problem do honouring we respect work anybody who contributes any colleague junior or senior whosoever does that we should not take work from anybody free of we should acknowledge after all all these honouring are what they are not like Mukesh Ambani's thousand crore rupees or something small amount we are giving it's more like a curtsy just recognizing that people have continued so we do that here I am the only person as a rule I don't take a single paisa of honourarium for either conducting lectures or doing something but that's a idiosyncrasy of an old man I believe it's an MHRD project and my life is dedicated to them but when my other colleagues help me I have to recognize that so when other colleagues take lectures or participate in something we give them honourarium as per our norms and you should do the same thing the last thing that I wanted to tell you is that this is a three year kind of project and we are going to encompass multiple subjects if any one of you know absolutely excellent teachers who have reputation for having taught a subject for 10-15 years and their top class do discreetly let us know through an email or something because for subsequent workshops next year I have convinced my colleagues that all teachers need not be from IIT Bombay alone they could be from anywhere in the country whosoever is the best teacher then we would like to involve such teachers if not singly maybe jointly with two or three other teachers maybe there is a coordinator for the subsequent workshops then they could come here stay for those 15 days and act as teachers from this side so this is just a request when you go back just tell us about whoever that teacher and what we also propose to do this time is we will have an FAQ section for coordinators so anytime a question is raised by a coordinator we will classify it and put it along with the answer there so that other coordinators could benefit from that I had one more query regarding stay so we have calculated some amount some average amount so is it required that we need to spend that into number of 30 participants so for example right now we have a guest house so the cost of each room it falls will be within this but just before coming over here I had a talk with a professor who is looking who has additional responsibility for looking after guest house and he said that there is a chance that in the next senate meeting in this month itself it may go up so right now it is around 250 rupees and it may go up to say 400 or 500 rupees for twin sharing so the per person may become 200 or 250 there is a chance so it is not it is not hard and then maybe what we are thinking we may put a request to director special case because this is a national mission in fact I think you should make all attempts to make some special cases like this because this is after all an internal adjustment yes a particular institute says no we cannot do this or the director is unable to take a special case do write to us and we will immediately respond and 99 percent the response should be ok go ahead because after all see that is not something where the money is going into somebody's pocket that is something that the institute charges what we would not like of course is to have a situation where the normal official rates for official work of an institute is say 100 rupees and just because M.H.R.D. is funding it we said 2 X rupees will be charged to the participant that will be very unfair and unfortunately that should not happen as long as these are normal official rates for example you are stay here our rate for usage other than IIT work is 1000 rupees a day but the institute is charging us for the official rate because all of you are supposed to be on official duty for IIT work which is not strictly true you are on an M.H.R.D. these are the privileges which every institution should extend that is then you are right if that happens so keep this budget in mind and anywhere you see that because of the institute rules or something something is changing ok then please inform us immediately simultaneously make a pleading request when you inform us what I will tell you the reaction from here when you inform me I will be writing a personal letter to the writer request him to kindly consider this and reduce this and in case he is not able to do that he will convey it to you and me in which case you spend the month but as far as the participants are concerned they do not see you just accommodate them and go ahead actually previously there are hostels sufficient but the previous 2 years the seats totally increased same thing in IIT so the students are accommodated in faculty guest house have 10 to 15 rooms so you have a problem you have 35 colleges in Bhopal right 50 colleges most of the thing also tell them that for this workshop the accommodation available will be only for so many people other people will have to come from their homes ask them to start early take an auto rickshaw Bhopal is big but not that big local so local candidates please tell them that accommodation is not possible in Bhopal city we have put in our brochure also a star mark and said that accommodation will be provided wherever available so that will have to be checked in fact such details if they are known to us in our website we will put already put as first come first serve also and yet the participants traveled every day and did that perfectly but I will tell you ideally if the faculty members stay on the campus there is a great advantage there is no pressure on completing the evening schedule some enthusiastic fellow can stay for an hour longer and if you have a student teaching assistant the student will not mind spending for some time these are some of the advantages if they are on campus there will be some discussion even on a Saturday Sunday which will not happen during the working days if people are like different between scholars and australisks you can even do something fancy if some other college has a guest house which can accommodate these participants within these costs and if they are not very far from MA and IT you can even have an arrangement with that college and transfer money lump sum to that college and get a single receipt from him and include it in your auditors be as innovative as possible the limits are the total amount of the budget as long as you spend it to maximize the number of participants no problem you can have partial accommodation and some coming there use your discretion