Go International

My Civil Engg. Dept. of Walchand College of Engineering, Sangli organised "International Conference on Recent Advances in Civil and Environmental Engineering" on 4th and 5th March 2017. I was fortunate to witness the entire episode right from its inception. To be frank, I was little bit worried and doubtful, whether proposed modifications in infrastructure, invitations to speakers, all the planned activities like reception, transport, accommodation, finance, scrutiny of invited papers and publication of proceedings can be completed in a short duration of about one and half months. I attended department meetings and was happy to notice excellent coordination between the faculty and staff in these arrangements. There was good response to call for papers from experts and research workers. A team of professors and technical consultants from Netherlands gave a real international flavour to the conference. Senior professors from IITs and research institutions presented their papers on various topics. The conference was well attended by large number of delegates and students.

Organising International Conference was a daunting task but the department took it as big challenge and proved its capability. It was a well organised team effort of faculty, staff and students of the Civil Dept under dynamic leadership of Dr. P. G. Sonavane, HOD Civil Dept. The conference was a great success and earned memorable reputation to Civil Dept. as well as for college.

Going International is the need of the day. It was revealed to me more explicitly when I listened to presentations of foreign experts. Though the papers presented by Indian experts were equally rich in technical details and innovative concepts, I found that all foreign experts had actual field experience of working in many countries, whereas Indian counterparts have concentrated their work at local level within India barring few exceptions. Much of the research done in India was limited to laboratory or academic level as actual field scale applications were not possible due to various reasons. On the other hand, due to global vision, the foreign experts had more financial backing, practical experience and greater acceptability for their research by developing countries.

In my opinion, this International Conference has shown us a new way for planning our research projects from local applicability level to international platform for harnessing necessary financial resources and making them more effective and capable of turning into technology innovations.