Other Innovations and Achievements

Apart from endeavoring and successfully implementing unique and adventurous innovations like ICT based blended education, selecting 93% of faculty from the bright IITians, selecting 40% faculty from the other states and ensuring diversity, quality of education equivalent to the best of NIT's even for the huge first batch of 6000 students, implementing the essential features of NEP- 2020 in 2010 itself, venturing and creation of 6000 plus internships, creating drug-free campuses, rising 'Bharat ke Yuva' culture among the students, the following other innovations too were endeavored:

• Prof Raja Kumar personally created the quality centric academic regulations of RGUKT at par with the IITs and the same was adopted successfully by RGUKT with full discipline.
• Personally oriented the faculty, students and was responsible in creating an academic culture which is better than the premier institutes, at RGUKT. This was acknowledged by His Excellency Sri ESL Narasimhan, the governor on the occasion of the 1st Convocation of RGUKT on Aug 4, 2014.
• In order to foster entrepreneurship amongst students, he conceptualized and was responsible for starting technology incubators at the campuses of RGUKT and as many as 50 students from the first batch of students did enroll in 2013-14. Three courses relevant to entrepreneurship have been introduced into the curricula of RGUKT
• A Centre for Technology innovation for Rural Sector was setup at the three campuses. About 20 – 30 students per campus from amongst the first two batches of graduates worked on projects relevant to rural sector and successfully completed their BTech thesis in technologies for rural sector. An undergraduate elective course on cases of technology innovation suitable for rural areas was introduced and a large number of students from the first batch underwent the same.
• Personally worked on and was responsible for obtaining AICTE approval for all the BTech and MTech academic programmes of RGUKT.
• Got UGC 2f status and completed all the formalities including expert committee visits for the UGC 12B status before relinquishing the position of VC. The university subsequently received the 12B recognition due to the same efforts.
• Prof Raja Kumar was responsible for creating Placement Cells at the campuses and headquarters, many reputed companies came for campus recruitments, despite it is the first batch, that the university didn’t have history yet and as many as 1000 students got placed through the campus placement cells.

Development of A Very Exceptional ERP System, In-house:

It is well known that a well-designed ERP system is essential for any modern and forward looking university like RGUKT to run the systems and functions of the university very efficiently, for database maintenance and record keeping besides others. When Prof Kumar took over in 2010, RGUKT didn’t have an ERP system, the admission process was outsourced to a sister institute and the PUC results were being maintained in Excel sheets. The admission process of RGUKT was based on the local (Mandal level) best model with, 85% reservation for rural students which was complicated in view of the significant difference with the systems in use elsewhere as well as implementation of 30% reservation for lady students. There were difficulties like mistakes in the selection lists for admissions done by the outsourced institute. Due to asset of serious negative reports in the press on the mistakes that cropped in the admissions of 2009-10 and 2010-11, the VC himself personally examined the system developed by the outsourced institute, found mistakes in the algorithms, personally guided and got them corrected by the team of outsourced agency. He also found that due to the personalized nature of the admissions, he felt that it should be developed in-house in a very modular fashion to facilitate changes any time and the source code be maintained active. He personally started working on the development of a full ERP system, in-house for the university starting with the admission process. The main job of developing the ERP system was done within the first one year that too by guiding a team of two very fresh software professionals, though they didn’t have any picture of the academic regulations and establishment rules of a university. It was a very courageous attempt by any standards of a new university.

Being a former Dean (academic) with long standing experience and decades of programming and systems experience, he took up the responsibility of creating an ERP on his own shoulders. He planned the whole architecture of the system personally and guided the programmers very closely and personally. Prof Kumar acknowledges the outstanding talent, skills and contributions made by Mr Chandra Vadde, and Mr Suresh Kumar K two IT Mentors of RGUKT who did put continuous hard work much beyond the office hours and commitment. Prof Kumar provided close guidance and majority of the functions of the ERP were developed in a very user friendly manner in-house, very efficiently within the first one and half years of his 5 – year tenure. The admission software was developed within one and half months and applied to 2010-11 admissions and it worked flawlessly.

Most of the functions of all the modules including the following except for the Finance module were developed:

• Full academics including Minor degree granting and automatic certificate and transcript printing which was implemented flawlessly for 18,000 engineering student strength of the university,
• Student database,
• Faculty and staff database,
• All application processes, admissions and tests for recruitments,
• Establishment module including leave,
• Other modules.

In the above mentioned modules, 90% of the university functions have already been developed with an exception to only rarely used special functions which may be added at any time and it can be done with ease. The product developed turned out to be functioning flawlessly, outstandingly well, and with a negligibly small number of complaints than similar systems in use elsewhere. The university has been functioning extremely well using the same ERP since 2010.