The city of Hyderabad is home to many academic institutions- and an amazingly diverse set at that. No fewer than three Central Universities- apart from the UoH, there are MANUU and EFLU (the only other city with more is Delhi that has DU, JNU, JMI and IGNOU), and several state universities- OU, Telugu University, technical universities BITS Pilani, JNTU, IIT and IIIT, several CSIR laboratories, several defence laboratories, NALSAR, the Indian School of Business, the Administrative Staff College of India… The list is long and very very varied.
Navigating through the academic landscape can be hard. Admittedly most of us don’t need to do it often, but if one did want to know where one could study a specific topic or degree, there is no easy way to get the information. Some time ago, when then Human Resources Minister of State, Dr. D Purandeswari visited our campus she asked many heads of institutions to come together to discuss, among other things, how we could network. It was quite an eye-opener, both as to what expertise there was in the city, and how little mutual information was shared.
And how little resources could be shared. For a brief while, there was some talk of the “meta university” concept, some sort of virtual coming together of academic institutions in cyberspace. But like all virtual enterprises, that too evaporated- one of the biggest difficulties in making things like this a reality seems to be economics- it is just impossible to do this on a nonexistent budget.
Nevertheless, we thought that it would be possible to go part of the way, and this is GHAN, the Greater Hyderabad Academic Network. This is a website where we have brought together information on all the academic institutions that are located in the city of Hyderabad. This is interpreted somewhat generously to include as many as we can, even if distances between the outermost entities are nearly 100 km.
To begin with, G-HAN is a collection of introductory information pertaining to all organizations devoted to various aspects of higher education and research. Given the fact that these are scattered in the Greater Hyderabad area, forming several clusters, this site is an attempt to give the visitor a quick introduction to,
- where an institution is located
- what it is about, and
- what expertise is represented there…
As of now, there are about 100 institutions listed on this site, but this is just the beginning since we have started with the governmental (both central and state) and semi-governmental sectors. There is a FaceBook page for GHAN as well. We hope to be inclusive and therefore we will be adding privately funded institutes and laboratories. If you have suggestions of what more should be there, please write in to the GHAN Team at ghan @uohyd.ac.in.
One small step, but hopefully a useful one, जी हाँ !
PS: Read the Indian Express story about GHAN-
WOW ! Hyderabad is indeed an academically rich & diverse place to live in…realizing it is a beginning.
Notable absentee in the list: TCIS / TIFR-H
Tells you when we started working on the idea!
Congratulations! it is a welcome move, which helps large number of students researchers and even policy makers..
Apart from academic institutions; G-HAN network must also consider R&D institutes, such as NGRI, IICT, ICRISAT, Oil Research Institute and many more… The point is; all these R&D institutes (why not Reddy’s Lab) have state-of-the art research facilities. While most of the academic institutes lag in that aspect. It is certainly a win-win both for academia and the research institutes.
The last response was impulsive; where I mentioned about the R&D institutions; just now i visited G-HAN; it is indeed a commendable job, the list is just shy of three digits. What is needed now is to let each and every individual of the listed institutes to know about G-HAN (via the respective webmaster); even an extra mile can be covered in popularizing G-HAN. I wish and hope that Defense labs come up with more shared information which can be better utilized by the students and researchers in academia.
The GHAN team is planning to write to the various institutions. If you have some contacts there, please tell them too- thanks.
It will be great if Mr. Ahmed would email to ghan@uohyd.ac.in with suggestions as well as names of research and academic institutes which may not yet have been listed.
Regards
I am getting the message:
The server at ghan.in is taking too long to respond.
When I try to get uohyd.ernet.in, I get the reply:
The connection has timed out
The server at http://www.uohyd.ac.in is taking too long to respond.
I am only happy that I am not alone.
C K Mitra at the Dept of Biochemistry
You can try typing “ghan.in” only in your browser search tab (on top of the window) and see if it is accessible.
Regards.
I tried to access ghan.in but failed. The following message appears:
504 Gateway Timeout
Gateway timeout expired while waiting for server response.
I am accessing from Kolkata. I have not been able to access the web site even once.
Try again- it seems to be up. Occasionally we are updating the site so there can be issues-
The way to see if a site is really down or not is to use “website-down.com” or “downforeveryoneorjustme.com”. Then you should check the address the site is resolving using dig or nslookup (unix or windows; respectively) commands. Then …
Results from the browser search (I use ddg; sometimes google) are mostly meaningless as they have been compiled sometime ago.
Sir,
Pleasantly suprised to find your blog as the VC of HCU.
The concept ‘meta university’ invites the question What is a University?.
We are living through a through devolution of University, from its origin in the Church, then to its secular version first in Germany and US, and then to what in 21C India.
Have you read Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of a University. I wonder if there is a philosophy department at HSU?
Sincerely
Vishal Mehra
UoH has one of the best Philosophy Department in the country with eminent professors…
http://www.uohyd.ac.in/index.php/academics/2011-10-27-18-38-04/school-of-humanities/dept-philosophy
http://www.uohyd.ac.in/index.php/academics/2011-10-27-18-38-04/school-of-humanities/dept-philosophy/faculty